beehaus demo

I went last night to a meeting of my local beekeepers' association, where someone from the Omlet company gave us a demo of the beehaus.  This is the new trendy beehive that appears frequently in newspaper photos in articles about beekeeping, and I was curious to know how it worked.  The name itself is pure genius.

It turns out to work on essentially the same principles as all other western beehives, which isn't surprising as it is designed to house the same bees.  Wild honey bees in a hollow tree build a series of flat wedges of honeycomb with gaps between each wedge just wide enough for the bees to move around.  Human honey hunters have to destroy the nest to take the honey.  Beekeepers persuade their bees to live in a beehive instead of a hollow tree, and fit the beehive with flat wooden frames filled with wax sheets embossed with a honeycomb pattern.  With any luck the bees build their combs on those sheets, then the beekeeper can remove the wooden frames to harvest the honey or see what the bees are doing without destroying the nest.  That is the essence of a modern beehive.

To get honey without bee grubs in it the beekeeper exploits the fact that the queen bee is larger than the worker bees to limit her to her own part of the beehive.  This is known as the brood box, and it is separated from the part of the hive where the bees store the surplus honey (if any) by a grid with holes large enough for the workers to pass through, but too small for the queen.  So the workers can go scooting around through the entire hive, but the queen has to stay in her own quarters.

The beehaus has all these parts, but arranged differently.  It is made out of brightly coloured rotational moulded plastic instead of wood, and looks like a giant coolbox on legs.  The developers of the beehaus, who designed it as a follow-up to their first product, the trendy plastic chicken house called the eglu (another brilliant name) studied industrial design at the Royal College of Art.  The beehaus is designed to meet a set of formal design requirements, which are to make beekeeping physically easier for the beekeeper, and socially more acceptable instead of being something that only middle-aged and elderly rural eccentrics would do  (the chap doing the presentation, who was fairly young and very charming, struggled slightly to explain this bit tactfully, faced with a room full of people at least half of whom obviously were middle-aged and elderly rural eccentrics).

The beehaus is on legs so that the beekeeper doesn't have to stoop and their work is made easier.  This is entirely sensible, though you can put any beehive on a stand of some sort.  It is brightly coloured and curvy, like something out of the Teletubbies, to make it more visually appealing to young and fashion conscious people, who might find a row of grungy brown wooden boxes offputting.  Again this is a nice sales pitch, though commiting yourself to keeping bees because you like the box is possibly unwise.  The beehaus is long because the brood box where the queen lives is designed as a double cube: put a divider in the middle of it and you can have two colonies side by side.  This means that when the beginner who got their first colony of bees earlier that year suddenly realises that they need to do some swarm control, for which they need a second beehive, and they don't have a second hive because they only bought one to spread the costs, well with the beehaus this will not arise because they already have a second hive at the other end of the beehaus.  Again that is fair enough, though you could just buy two hives to start with (but people don't).  The boxes that go on top of the brood box for the surplus honey are smaller than traditional boxes, to make them lighter to lift when they are full of honey, and you can spread them further across the top of the hive so that you don't have to pile them as high, which again is useful if you don't find it easy lifting boxes weighing over 10 kilos at shoulder height.  There is a big curvy roof that fastens on with chunky elastic.  The beehaus is UV stabilised and said to last at least twenty years.

The chap from Omlet was giving away copies of the brochure you get if you buy a beehaus, and since I had agreed to write up the meeting for the Essex beekeeping magazine I felt justified in taking one.  I haven't read it cover to cover yet, but it looks pretty good.  Part of the sales pitch is that new beekeepers can get all their equipment from Omlet, and shopping on their website is a lot less confusing than having to wade through the catalogues of the traditional beekeeping equipment suppliers, which do tend to be pretty dry and technical.  Looking at the brochure and what you got for your initial £465 double width beehive I did think you would need to buy some extra bits and pieces fairly early in your beekeeping career.

So I thought hats off to the Omlet people for thinking fresh thoughts on an old subject.  I won't actually be buying a beehaus.  Partly this is because I already have sunk costs in traditional equipment, but mainly because I don't want one.  I would rather set up my hives individually and be able to choose which direction to point the entrance than be forced to arrange them back to back.  And I like things made out of wood.  If they get accidentally damaged they can generally be mended, which is more than you can say for rotationally moulded plastic.  And I am not young, or trendy, and don't want a brightly coloured giant coolbox at the end of the garden.  But it looked great for people who like that sort of thing.