How biodynamic and hua parakore beekeeping compare with classical practices
With a focus on commercial, environmental and land use benefits.
Today, bees are quite massively dying, exhausted by pesticides, pathogens and parasites, climate change and the depletion of honey resources, electromagnetic waves, and decades of intensive beekeeping practices. We are reaching the end of a system obsessed with honey that has forgotten its basic needs.
In Biodynamic/Hua Parakore beekeeping, it's the opposite: we allow honeybee swarms to express their natural behaviors, self-building wax combs, no artificial insemination, medicine plant disease treatment, and we act to promote their health and that of the environment, without giving up the honey harvest and honeybee queen genetics as their best. Whether we are responsible for one hive or several hundred, biodynamic practices show concrete and captivating possibilities for improving worldwide beekeeping and honeybee queen breeding.
Building a bridge between biodynamics and hua parakore
Shared values and local adaptation
A hundred years ago, Biodynamics was taking off from the heart of Europe. The plants recommended for making these preparations are common on the Old Continent, but unsuitable for other climates. This presents a double challenge for New Zealand, seeking alternatives against all forms of neocolonialism.
Fortunately, Hua Parakore has its own tone, drawing on resonance with the philosophies and practices of Maori people. These voices find in biodynamics a form of common language, a foundation to innovate beekeeping methodologies. Local communities are forming on the Te Waka Kai Ora foundation and connecting with each other. Throughout Mills Farm™ projects, links are being forged beyond borders, uniting to share issues of certification, research, and training, as well as to dialogue to provide impetus for high-quality new beekeeping standards.
Environmental and land use benefits
Biodynamic farming has a long history in New Zealand and reached its peak twenty-five years ago, but joint biodynamic marketing initiatives were too underdeveloped. Consequently, only direct sales remain today.
New Zealand's apiculture strategy 2024–2030
Thriving Together: Futureproofing the New Zealand Apiculture Sector outlines the 2024-2030 commercial strategy to ensure NZ apiculture, as a whole, can thrive and grow into the future.
“This included recognizing the importance of a united sector empowered to deliver, building a sustainable and equitable funding model to enable reinvestment into the sector, delivering on our export market consumer needs and New Zealand’s differentiating reputation for highest-quality honey, leading social good and environmental practices, and strengthening engagement with Māori to enable our major honey export earner, Mānuka, to be recognized and protected as a taonga species unique to New Zealand”.
Biodynamics produce honeybee products that meet and exceed global consumer expectations with a differentiation on quality, sustainability, social and ethical attributes. “The export sector needs to focus on building value for all through category growth activity and increasing consumer awareness by delivering on the promise of New Zealand producing the highest-quality hive’s products and recognized as the only credible source of Mānuka honey.”
Risks linked to intensive beekeeping
Biodynamic beekeeping practices have long opposed the disrespectful practices of industrial beekeeping and warn against the genetic manipulation of bees. Due to the national Manuka rush, the intensive management of honeybee hives through transhumance impacts local and native bees, as well as sharing viruses, honeybee diseases, and excessive hybridization rates within transhumed swarms.
Recent discoveries show us that the honeybee colony-organism is intelligent in the way it communicates and adapts to changes in its environment. The Mills Farm™ project will show how to work in harmony with them. By changing our attitude and our beekeeping techniques when reaching out to them, we work on their wisdom, thanks to the cosmic calendar and specific agendas to breed, grow, and produce high-quality honeybee hive products. Like the seeds in Hua Parakore, innovative beekeeping management models are being proposed, as well as breeding methods that promote greater harmony with their actions, especially when producing bee venom, whose sacred nature is once again being considered.
Biodynamics and organic beekeeping
Methods and practical applications differ primarily in considering the honeybee swarm as a whole, unique living organism, along with its environment, the beekeeper, the soil, and the seller/buyer community. When dealing with honeybees, we work with the swarm as an entire organism, not just the honeybees, the queen, drones, and other native bees/pollinators. We make all of these (taking also beekeepers in the dynamics) as a unity that we need to enhance, adapt, protect, and grow throughout the years.
Shared ground with māori philosophy
Māori culture and anthroposophical/biodynamic philosophies are synergistic and provide a good basis for mutual understanding.
- The living soil
- Mauri
- Everything is connected: The Māori holistic worldview
- Water
- Earth is but a reflection of the cosmos
Hereafter, some examples we need to deal with biodynamics innovative strategies to produce high-quality queens and bee venom:
- Relationship between maramataka and the biodynamic planting calendar
- Māori food and soil sovereignty
- Biodynamic preparations and their uses to enhance the mauri of the honeybee swarms (making compost to enhance the mauri of soil / Enhancing soil fertility with preparations 500 / Making and using cow pat pit (CPP)/ Planting fruit trees, basic pruning, applying tree paste).