About us | custosapium

Our journey with bees

At Custos Apium our objectives are to find the balance between the needs of the Bee and the practice of beekeeping and also aiding the Rewilding of the Honeybee. We design our beehives to try and meet these purposes.

We are an anglo/Dutch couple based in La Creuse on the Northern edge of the Parc Naturel Régional de Millevaches en Limousin in central France, a fairly wild and rugged rural region.

Our hives are now situated across this terrain in all directions from the Correze and Haute-Vienne to the south to La Nievre and Berry in the North. This is possible thanks mainly to our amazing clients who understand that the needs of the bee, particularly the hiving of bees, are very important, when considering taking up beekeeping.

We started keeping bees in the conventional way a decade ago. As we immersed ourselves in this fascinating hobby, we realized that there were many contradictions involved. Modern beekeeping practice and the general well being off the honey bee was obviously not a match made in nature. We decided to step back and look at the situation particularly regarding the hiving of bees. We also adapted to a near zero intervention and non-treatment method of beekeeping. We take very little honey. This is the balance we set out to correct with our method and it seems to be paying off as we occur very low colony losses.

Over the last 6 years we have slowly progressed a design for a low to zero intervention beehive. We call it the Custos hive. The hive is designed to catch feral bees and give them a home that is as close to a natural hollow tree cavity as possible. There is the possibility of a very small honey take once the colony is established. Beyond that, the colony remains feral without hindrance existing and propagating naturally as any feral colony would in the wild. In effect this has also now become a rewilding project, as bees naturally find, colonize and propagate from our beehives. That's nature!