Based on Traditional Japanese Hive

We’re excited about our brand-new design! Our new Hachi Hive is beautiful, durable, inexpensive and easy to work with, plus- you can build it yourself!

‘Hachi’ means ‘bee’ in Japanese.  Purchase our new plan and support Japanese mothers in their demands for green energy in Japan. Become a ‘Daichi-Hachi’- a ‘Number One Bee’ for green energy!

-Designed by Melissa Elliott of Melissa Bees

-Beautiful and durable

-Estimated Materials Cost: $150.00

-Bees build natural comb

-Boxes are nadired like a Warre Hive

-Honeycomb easily removed or honey extracted

-Easy-to-read and understand plans

-Become a Daichi-Hachi!  Portion of profits donated to Japanese mothers working to promote green energy in Japan.

$10.00-Order NOW in time for swarm season!

PDF  plans available Feb. 25, 2013

Want to get started beekeeping? Interested in chemical-free bees and beekeeping? Want to know more about Langstroth, Top-bar and Warre hives? These classes are for you!

Join Melissa Elliott of Melissa Bees, a local landscape designer, beekeeper and apitherapist for an inspiring and informative look into the life and times of the honeybee and beekeeper! In class one- ‘History and Life-Cycle of the Bee‘-  learn about humanity’s primeval relationship with the bee, her medicine and honey. Peer into the mysterious inner workings of the hive.  Discover the miraculous abilities of our most ancient ally, the honeybee. Practical matters will be covered: the how, where, when, cost, etc. of starting beekeeping. In class two -’The First Year of Keeping‘- subjects include hive placement and protection, sourcing bees, hiving bees (putting them in the hive), handling the bees, swarming (bees’ natural increase) honey supering and related topics.  Resource materials will be available to take home.

Cost: $80 for two classes (Cash or Check) or by Paypal incl. taxes and fees.  Payment address: PO Box 62, White Salmon, WA 98672.

 When: Feb 19th & 26th @ 6:30 pm

Where: Private residence, White Salmon WA. On sign-up you will receive location info.

Buy Beginning Beekeeping Series -Feb. 19th & 21st :

Students learned about the holistic healing abilities of the bees; how they convert raw substances from the plants and land into food and medicines that help them thrive: including honeycomb, propolis, bee bread, honey, royal jelly and bee venom. Students learned how to apply these products to support their own natural immunity and health.

It’s great to have the support from People’s Co-op who carries BeePharm products.  I look forward to teaching more bee classes there in the future!

Poland is the size of New Mexico and contains 900,000 hives, according to Jacob Gabka, a queen breeder from the Warsaw University of Life Sciences.  We met at Sue Cobey’s queen-rearing class last summer when he was doing research alongside the creator of the New World Carniolan Queen.  He informed me there are only 2.4 million hives total in the U.S. and that 1.5 million of them are used for almond pollination.  We have a long way to go in this country to achieve the depth of devotion to bees that the Polish have.  I asked him if he’d seen the video of Polish beekeepers protesting GMOs in Warsaw a few months prior.  He said no, so I got my laptop out to show him.  Interestingly, several times that day we discussed in class the necessity of clean land for queen rearing programs; they’re often sequestered away from agricultural areas as bees are quite sensitive to chemicals and less likely to rear successfully in spray areas.  He chuckled as he watched and I told him of my vision of dubbing American children’s voices over the old Polish beekeepers.  My dream finally came true when a group of my beekeeping students and community got together to make this video.  I hope it will spur American beekeepers to action to help protect the bees and our children from the harmful effects of GMOs.

Register Here

Composting wasn’t on the radar screen in Portland when I started gardening there in the mid-90′s.  A few of my clients had those small black plastic compost bins which weren’t much use to a gardener who generated yards of cuttings each visit.  Unlike Eugene (where I gardened previously) where having at least one compost pile was as requisite a lifestyle item as a blue tarp, the neighbors to the north hadn’t quite caught a whiff of the green home revolution yet.  It was common practice in those days to haul garden debris away to a landscape center where it was processed- only later to be hauled back to the garden in the form of compost.  Compost that contained the combined vegetative effluence from both residential and commercial landscapes, many of which were sprayed on a weekly basis with herbicides and pesticides.

At the time it seemed ridiculous to me to involve so many fossil fuels in the process of soil making. Gas-powered blowers ‘cleaned up’ the detritus of fall which was trucked to the outskirts of town where it was shoveled multiple times by backhoes, ground up, shoveled into windrows to cook, turned, and shoveled into piles where it was shoveled again into individual trucks to be put back into gardens again.  While garden compost made this way is useful for new landscapes and improving soil for the first few years in a garden, an established garden can be maintained for the most part with soil generated  from leaves, perennial, vegetable and softwood cuttings on site.

Attempts at discussion in the 90′s of compost piles in residential gardens were often met with “Rats. We don’t want rats. Doesn’t compost attract rats?” If you spend any time working outside in Portland, you will see rats scuttling in the gutters, bounding the curb, making their way to any immaculate inner-city or suburban front door.  Compost or no, where there are sewers there will be rats using your lawn or garden as a super-highway. Clearly there was much work for me to do in the area of compost education.

I began by making what I call ‘Compost Columns’, at least three-foot diameter rings of welded wire mesh, to be filled with garden debris.   I placed them at convenient intervals throughout a garden, sometimes hidden in the plants, other times near hose bibs and potting areas where old plants and potting soil could be dumped.  There was no need to turn the debris, just add to column at the top- as it composted nicely within the ring.  Columns were placed under trees to feed ravenous roots and to accelerate decomposition.  (Its amazing how fast the level inside the column goes down when its under a tree!)  If I wanted to extract soil, I would turn over a column set outside a tree canopy and shovel out the rich, black, worm-filled humus. Cuttings re-sprouted and grew on the outside edges of sun-exposed columns, making a plant-fringed upright structure. Compost Columns made a great vertical composting system for small scale gardens, like those in Portland.

Compost Columns worked great for the most part, and were handy for me to use as a gardener.  It took a little bit of convincing for a few clients, until they became gardeners too and saw the benefit.  My compost cause received a boost when I returned from a trip to Manhattan with a photo of Central Park on 5th Avenue with Compost Columns in larger scale use.  “See,” I said “They do it on 5th Avenue too.”

My latest development of the Compost Column is a ring of brightly-colored sticks to hold cuttings, seen in the photos.  I love this version, especially in the fall when they contrast the Neapolitan layers of red, yellow and brown garden debris. This compost pile is between a garden walkway and the sidewalk on the way to Mt. Tabor and receives accolades from passers’ by.

Portland now picks up both kitchen and garden compost combined at the curb.  Its a terrific advancement, but it still takes fuel to process and there are reports in the news of neighbors’ annoyance at the stink emanating from the collection centers.  I think there’s a lot of work to be done keeping leaves and garden debris on site.  Along with Compost Columns, I’m devising plantings that can receive leaf-fall, so we can ‘leave the leaves’ in the fall and help keep the soil local.