Oct 10-14, 2011
Teachers: Phil Chandler, Brigit Strawbridge, Juergen Tautz and Graham White
This course is open for bookings.
There is currently unprecedented interest in bees, as people begin to wake up to their importance and the threats they are facing. Bee colonies are some of the most complex and fascinating life forms on earth, and understanding them helps us better appreciate the interdependence of all ecosystems and our role as humans within them.
Schumacher College has put together a course that brings together scientists, beekeepers and campaigners to present a holistic perspective on the world of bees. Participants will gain the opportunity to find out about the behaviour of bees and what they can teach us about the natural world – and ourselves.
The course will cover:
Teachers
Phil Chandler
Phil is the author of The Barefoot Beekeeper. He took up beekeeping at the turn of the century, having campaigned against GM crops for several years and concluded that bees were a lot more important than most people realized. Conventional beekeeping seemed too mechanistic and bound up in Victorian attitudes towards nature, so he developed his own system based on top bar hives. A year spent working in commercial beekeeping at Buckfast Abbey convinced him that ‘natural’ beekeeping was the way to go. In 2005, he was awarded Advanced Certification by the National Diploma of Beekeeping Board. Having further developed his hive and techniques, he wrote The Barefoot Beekeeper in 2007 as a challenge to conventional beekeeping, and to put his case for reform.
Since then, around 10,000 people have bought the book and many of them have adopted top bar hives and natural beekeeping methods. Nowadays he spends his time studying, teaching and writing. His aim is to teach others to observe for themselves and to learn from the bees.
Brigit Strawbridge
Brigit Strawbridge moved with her family to a smallholding in Cornwall in 2005. Their endeavours to reduce their dependence on the grid and to live a more sustainable lifestyle were followed in the BBC2 series It’s Not Easy Being Green. Following the series Brigit moved back to Malvern, Worcestershire where she founded environmental charity ‘The Big Green Idea’. Over the past few years Brigit has become increasingly concerned about the plight of our native bees and now talks, writes and campaigns to raise awareness of their importance and the problems they face.
Jurgen Tautz
Jurgen is the author of The Buzz About Bees: Biology of a Superorganism. He is a professor at the University of Wuerzburg and leads a research group which studies the behaviour and sociobiology of honeybee colonies. Since 2006 he has developed HOBOS (Honey Bee Online Studies) www.hobos.de as a novel and interactive teaching concept. A preliminary stage of HOBOS came about on June 1, 2009 and made it possible for school classes from nine countries to delve into a real honeybee colony via the Internet. These countries included Germany, USA, China, Luxembourg, Northern Ireland, Italy, South Africa, Switzerland and Jordan.
Graham White
Graham is a writer and photographer on environmental issues, and author/ editor of The Scottish Environmental Handbook; The Nature of Scotland (with Magnus Magnusson); John Muir- Journeys in the Wilderness and other books. He has kept honeybees since 1995 and currently has ten hives; he first became aware of the threat posed by neonicotinoid pesticides in 2005 and has campaigned about the subject ever since. His bee photos can be seen on Flickr here and he keeps an ‘occasional’ bee blog at: Border Bee Diary
Phil Chandler – How to do a quick check on a top bar hive
Brigit Strawbridge – Mason Bees (Osmia Rufa) nesting in bamboo bee hotel
£450 All course fees include accommodation, food, field trips and all teaching sessions.
For further information about Schumacher College please see About the College
Click here to access our on-line booking system
click here to find out how to book by fax or mail
To provisionally reserve a place for 5 days, email us your contact details and the name of the course admin@schumachercollege.org.uk
We will hold the place for five working days for reservations – three weeks before a course or earlier. After five days we will automatically offer your place to someone else if we have not received your application.
