Les Crowder lives in Austin, Texas with his family. He regularly teaches beekeeping classes, including for the Hays County Beekeepers Association; and helps people with their bees as a consultant. Throughout his career as a beekeeper, he has always looked for ways to make beekeeping less expensive (he can build a complete Top-Bar Hive for $25 using his TBH Plans) and for ways to eliminate toxic inputs in the hive, starting with antibiotics and now miticides. In addition, he recommends learning about bees well enough to pre-emptively know when and how to intervene in order to avoid disease or parasite problems as naturally as possible (mostly mites, some hive beetles concerns); and how to help the bees survive in the least toxic way.

Nothing replaces Hands-On experience and Frame Time, so Les teaches at his Apiary in South Austin 7 hours of theory and practice for an in-depth experience where all questions have time to be answered

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Accomplishments:

• He has been keeping bees in Langstroth and Top-Bar Hives for over 45 years, both as a hobby and as a business

• Earlier in his career, he worked for a business with 4,000 hives in New Mexico

• He was the president of New Mexico beekeepers association multiple times

• He was a honeybee inspector in New Mexico for 5 years

• He has taught highly popular beekeeping classes domestically and abroad for over 35 years (both in English and Spanish)

• He also has a degree in biology from the University of New Mexico

In 2012, he wrote “Top-Bar Beekeeping: Organic Practices for Honeybee Health”, a very popular book  which has sold and continues to be sold all over the world (www.chelseagreen.com/topbar-beekeeping )