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Kirk Webster
Author of Many Best Kept Secrets: A Wonderful and Unusual Life Around Honey Bees
By: Ross Conrad
On the occasion of the publication of his first book, I had the privilege of getting to sit down with beekeeper and author Kirk Webster to discuss his recent book.
I first learned of Kirk in 1992 when I started working for Bill and Charlie Mraz of Champlain Valley Apiaries in Middlebury, Vermont. I was newly hired and on my first week of the job when a guy stopped by the honey house to speak with Bill. After the guy left, I asked Bill, “who was that?” Bill said that the person he had just been speaking with was a former employee named Kirk Webster, and then he said “Kirk is a meticulous beekeeper”. This comment always stuck with me in no small part because it stoked curiosity in me of what it meant to be a “meticulous beekeeper”. Kirk’s meticulous nature comes through in his writing not just in his detailed description of how he developed a way to maintain a commercially successful apiary without relying on chemical varroa mite treatments of any kind, but in his approach to writing this book.
The book steals from, and builds upon the many articles Kirk has written over the years including an article critical of commodity based industrial agriculture and published in the Small Farmer’s Journal in the Spring of 2014 titled, The Best Kept Secret.
In 2014 Kirk wrote: “…to succeed farmers need to create their own systems, their own reality, and do their own research…“The best kept secret”, still seems to be one of the best ways of describing a really successful small farm in North America today. This kind of success is still not part of modern American culture; still unknown and unknowable to most people who must work and live every day in the predatory and abusive modern American society. But it may not be quite as invisible as it was fifteen years ago–at least where the local food movement has really struck a chord and more people are seeking out and producing food for their neighbors. I still don’t believe, however, that very many of these seekers really understand what they are seeing, or that many producers are necessarily aware of what they are doing. The most serious obstacle to success with a small farm remains the same: embracing the values and habits needed to see and actually utilize the power and benevolence of Nature, while being surrounded by a society that is actively destructive and in conflict with those values and habits.”
Many Best Kept Secrets is part biography, part beekeeping manual, and part history book. Kirk’s writing incorporates numerous profound observations taken from his many decades working with honey bees: observations that to our detriment remain unrecognized, ignored, or in some cases actively suppressed by modern society.
I asked Kirk about the themes of the book. “There are a few themes running through the book. I wanted to tell the story of how I created the untreated apiary and to document how I did the whole thing without any other support or income of any kind and that it actually paid for itself the entire time and that I think the beekeeping community has missed this huge opportunity to get rid of these treatments. It could have been decades ago. Randy Oliver in a recent article in the American Bee Journal says, “it’s time to start breeding bees that can coexist with varroa” and I’m like no, it’s not time. It was time 40 years ago, and there was some of us who started then.”
As Kirk points out in his book, the real and only lasting answers to the problems faced by farmers is not going to come from the business world which has created many of the problems faced by agriculture today. Nor will it come from the scientific community with its requirement to break everything down into separate components and compartmentalizing everything rather than embracing the much larger complete picture. And it certainly isn’t going to come from the government which tends to be more inclined to maintain the status quo rather than implement dramatic but necessary policy changes. The best business, science and government can do is be helpful. Ultimately, farmers and beekeepers themselves are the only ones that can solve the massive problems facing agriculture today. They are the only ones that are willing get their hands dirty and implement the on-the-ground solutions that take into account the big picture as well as account for the unique and extremely localized factors that apply to their particular situation.
As Kirk explains, “None of the people who’ve succeeded at treatment-free beekeeping are using the same program…That’s another part of the message. I compare beekeeping with farming in general in a lot of ways and all real farming is local and in a contract between the farmer, or farmer’s family, and their particular piece of land. No two of these contracts are ever the same even though some people do a lot of the same things. That’s the difference between real farming and industrial agriculture, where industrial agriculture wants to make every acre the same; use the same fertilizers, the same crops, the same genetics, with one crop growing in each field and now we are paying big time for how much that’s been accepted all over the world.
Kirk Webster displays his new book while enjoying a beautiful late Summer day sitting on his porch.” Photo credit: Ross Conrad, Dancing Bee Gardens
“There was this great series of treatment free beekeeping meetings in central Massachusetts. They were the best meetings I ever went to. They were attended mostly by Americans, but a few Canadians and some came from further afield like New Zealand and Europe. All the presenters described what they were doing and they were all doing something different…In talking with all the people I know who have gone through the process, it’s was the same thing: each one had to build their apiaries up in his or her location under their own circumstances and had to figure our what was right for that location with whatever environment and resources they had.”
Kirk went on to share some examples. “My friend Chris Baldwin, was a commercial beekeeper. He produced honey in South Dakota and made nucs in Texas. He didn’t go to California except for a couple years when he really needed to when his honey crop failed. He converted his apiary to Russian bees over two or three years by just buying the breeder queens and with fewer than ten queens he changed his 1,000 colony outfit to Russian bees and never changed anything else that he did…He retired three or four years ago and sold his bees to another beekeeper who hasn’t kept up with the treatment-free stuff. He still has a couple hundred colonies, and he is one of the best beekeepers I know.
“Then there is the incredible example of the guy I dedicated the book to, Terje Reinertson, from Norway who I met at a treatment-free meeting in Sweden. He invited me to come to his place and I was there for two weeks in August of ’22. He converted his bees with the least trouble that I have heard. He hardly used any treatments at all when varroa came and his bees had an element of Russian bees that he got somewhere, along with an element of the Swedish, Elgon bees that he put together somehow in his area…He tested the bees by digging up colonies of live ants and going into the beeyard and taking a frame of brood out of the brood nest, holding it horizontally with all the bees on it and sprinkling a few live ants on the frame and watching the response of the bees. He used the colonies that were very aggressive immediately toward the ants. That’s how he selected his breeders for years.”
So what inspired Kirk to write Many Best Kept Secrets? “I’ve written many articles and essays over the years describing what I was doing but I think these things have been ignored and marginalized by the beekeeping world to the great detriment to the beekeepers working to find ways to keep bees without treatments. We need to focus on a healthy environment instead of being pesticide applicators ourselves. Then there’s the ideas of Sir Robert Howard and Mr. Fukuoka which are well known in the organic farming world but are not understood in the beekeeping world at all, and they should be.”
Writing a book is a milestone in one’s life. I asked Kirk what milestone he would say Many Best Kept Secrets represents for him?
“The end of my useful life (laughs). No, I had to do something before that milestone came, because there’s the whole other story that’s starting about if we are going to wake up and figure out a way to get our food without poisoning the environment as part of the process. That’s the real existential threat to honey bees. There is the story of how I got through all the threats that came during my career, that seemed so devastating and how I dealt with them and succeeded in the long run, but in the last couple chapters I write about how we’re up against this real problem.”
Kirk went on: “We’re the last generation to experience the world something like it had been experienced throughout human history. I’m part of the last generation to have a mind that is something like it’s been throughout human history. This world of electronics has changed people in really basic ways. I decided that I should preserve the good things about this old way of being because I’m in the last generation that can even do so and I’m much more comfortable that way. I think it is a disaster and the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is just the pinnacle. It’s going to make it impossible for people to accomplish anything in the future, although they feel like they are accomplishing everything.”
Full disclosure: I consider Kirk a friend, and agree with many of his opinions, especially when it comes to our over reliance on toxic chemical pesticides and our electronic-technologically driven culture so I am biased toward liking this book. My own observation is that AI is eroding our agency. We are creative beings and we need to experience the satisfaction that comes with living our lives through our own creativity and decision making process. If AI continues to evolve to the point where some say it is headed, it will be deciding where we live, what we do for work, and how we spend most of our day. If this happens the level of mental illness experienced by society will dwarf the current levels of depression, suicide and mood, thinking and behavioral disorders associated with smart phones and social media.
Kirk Webster pulls a thin sheet of beeswax through precisionly manufactured rollers while producing sheets of his home-made foundation. Photo Credit: Ross Conrad, Dancing Bee Gardens
I leave you with a quote from page 282 of Many Best Kept Secrets, by Kirk Webster – “As a society and as a culture, we’re losing the ability to take care of living things. We’ve lost the creative and healthy relationship with Nature that we need to be happy and creative ourselves. Because there are so many of us, and because our food production dominates the landscape on every continent wherever there’s water and temperatures suitable for us to live – agriculture is the arena where this relationship has to emerge and grow. None of our other accomplishments as a species will survive without it. And if you think perhaps climate change is a bigger priority than a creative agriculture, think again. The only (safe, proven and cost effective – ed.) way to sequester all the carbon we have released into the atmosphere is to raise the organic matter content of all the soils we use worldwide for agriculture. And the only way to do that is with a balanced, organic agriculture that includes many plants, animals and people all living together. The real, creative solutions to the localized biological problems of farming and beekeeping always come from the ground under the farmer’s feet; from his or her own mind, and carried out with their own hands.”
Note: Kirk Webster quotes have been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Ross Conrad keeps bees in Middlebury, Vermont.
