Crafting a Round Honey Bee Hive

The idea came to me as I sat in a swarm of wild honeybees while camping in Arizona’s Tonto National Forest.

“How would you create a round beehive?” I wondered as hundreds of tiny bee legs tickled my face and neck.

I was performing a stunt for a Tic-Tok video in which I removed my 3 inch long beard, poured honey on my face and allowed the bees to clean the honey off.

I sat for nearly three hours constantly aware of the hundreds of little stingers just millimeters from my skin. On a few occasions the little buggers made a quick search of my nostrils. Those moments were definitely the most nerve wracking of the whole experience, thankfully they didn’t travel too deep.

After about an hour I settled into the moment and began thinking about the challenges I’ve faced keeping honeybees in the past.

I’ve kept bees for several years and consistently found myself running into issues with my colonies dying in the winter. Each spring I would open up the hive and find the entire colony dead. Hundreds of honeybees frozen in place with their tiny heads stuck deep in a cell of the honeycomb, driven by hunger to break cluster and die in the cold.

I love problem solving and DIY crafting. My stunt with the honeybees was a break from building my own tiny roundhouse, an 8 foot diameter circle on a trailer just light enough to pull behind my Subaru Outback.

As I sat in the swarm I considered the wild hives I’ve encountered in trees or in people's homes. In a traditional, rectangular, Langstroth hive honey bees are forced to build comb in straight lines. The design is utilitarian in nature and meant to give the beekeeper ease of access to the bees, the wax and honey they create.

In the wild, however, bees weave their comb in unique patterns and often have a central column they can travel down during the winter in order to hold a tight cluster around the Queen. This keeps the entire colony warm and gives them easy access to their food stores.

In a Langstroth hive if the bees run out of food in the central column they have to break cluster and cross frames of comb to access honey in the outer frames. In the middle of winter this act can be fatal.

In a round hive with comb woven together naturally the cluster of bees moves down the comb warming it as they go. The wax is softened making consumption of the honey easier for the colony. The wax also acts as an insulator from the bitter cold outside. This is my theory anyway.

CRAFTING A ROUND HIVE

With little foragers licking honey from my cheeks I began designing a hive in my mind. It would be a reimagining of the old Skep hive used in the Middle Ages, round and woven from straw.

I decided that fabric wrapped around an old propane tank and hardened with fiberglass resin would allow me to create a form that could be easily replicated and light enough to stack multiple units on top of each other.

The design lingered in my mind as I completed the construction of my own roundhouse, a project I hoped would only take a few weeks but ended up lasting well into the spring.

With my own round roof finally over my head my attention turned to creating a tiny roundhouse for a honeybee family.

After scratching out a quick list of materials I went out to gather supplies. At the top of my list was a pair of Fiskar scissors. A sharp heavy duty pair of sheers would be essential for cutting the fabric that would become the body of the hive.

It wouldn’t be the first time I used a Fiskar product to work with honeybees. A few summers back a friend and I used a pair of Fiskar Extendable Handle Loppers to cut a branch from a tree to catch the swarm of honeybees hanging from the limb.

Scissors in hand I began cutting fabric, forming it to my empty propane tanks and covering it with fiberglass resin. I added several layers for strength and insulation.

Once the form hardened I removed it from the propane tank. After letting it breath for a few days I coated the inside and outside with raw unfiltered beeswax. The stench of fiberglass resin is strong and I didn’t want the bees to be scared off by the smell.

FINDING HONEYBEES

Honeybees can be purchased in the spring in one of two ways. As a package or a Nucleus, commonly referred to as a Nuc. A package comes with a queen and several thousand workers in a small cage.

A Nuc is five frames of bees with a laying queen and established brood comb, this is the area where the Queen lays her eggs.

When my round hive was finally ready for honeybees the time for ordering a package had already passed. A quick search of the Michigan Beekepers Facebook page led me to a local beekeeper who sold me a Nuc to get started.

With the bees already established on frames I needed to build a transitional box that I could place the round hive on. This box would need a hole in the roof to give easy access to the round hive above.

MOVING BEES

My first attempt at transitioning the bees from the temporary Nuc box to my transitional box was an utter failure.

It was late in the evening and try as I might I couldn’t get the lid off the temporary box. In addition I received a half dozen stingers as a demand to back off and let the colony be for the night.

The following day my attempts to transition the hive were a success.and despite the disruption to the colony the sentinel bees refrained from sinking their tiny little stingers into my flesh.

With all the frames inside and the roundhive on top I stepped back to watch the colony settle in.

DARWINIAN BEEKEEPING

While making plans and collecting materials for building a round hive I discovered an article on “Darwinian Beekeeping” at Nature.com.

The article confirmed some of my theory on the benefits of allowing Honey Bees to live in a natural setting rather than confining them in a box and restricting them to frames.

The article explores the research done by Thomas Seely, author of the book, “The Lives of Bees.”

In his book Seely calls for “Darwinian Beekeeping”, “modeled after Darwinian medicine, which posits that mismatches between the current environment and the environment to which an organism originally adapted diminish the organism’s fitness.”

Seely has conducted research by housing bee colonies in tree homes and man made hive bodies that replicate the tree house experience.

Seely’s research shows that “Darwinian beekeeping” is better for the hive but in the long run it results in less honey and pollination production for us humans.

Is there a balance between the two? I hope to find out over the course of the next year as honeybees take up residence in my first prototype of a round bee hive. The true test will come when the snow flies, but until then the bees have all summer to prepare for the cold Michigan winter.