With the current attitude of the "domesticated" Honey bees are often forgotten where the original home of these animals was. It's the forest. For many millennia, bees looked for their burrows in rotten trees or in trees in which other animals had already built a burrow. In our forests/plantations managed by the timber industry, this possibility hardly exists anymore. So-called dead wood is cleared out to quickly make room for new plantings.
As part of our research into optimizing bee health, we have discovered harmful deficiencies in the magazine hives commonly used in recent years. Mold formation often occurs, especially in humid weather conditions, which is detrimental to bee health. This is due to the poor insulation that magazine hives usually offer with only 25mm wall thickness. This also leads to an increased energy requirement for bees in winter to keep the hive at a temperature of over 30 ° Celsius. Strong sunlight can even melt the wax in midsummer, destroying the bee colony.
So-called log hives, which are modeled on a tree cavity, are more species- and character-appropriate. However, this type of handcrafted hive puts a significant strain on the beekeeper's budget. Together with friends of the foundation from the region, we held a workshop last week and built a log hive ourselves from a piece of tree trunk. The aim was to create a healthy and cost-effective housing for the bees that had optimal insulation.
A local firewood supplier was impressed by this idea and supplied us with a corresponding piece of acacia trunk with a diameter of a good 40 cm free of charge. The dense, hard acacia wood is ideal for building a log hive. This also applies to other hardwoods such as copper beech or oak - the aim in the first step was to hollow out the trunk and leave an edge of around 5 cm thick for insulation. The cave must be calculated so that the bees will later have a volume of around 40 liters or more available. Under these conditions, we chose a height of approx. 60 cm. The work was done with chainsaws, hammers, gouges and chisels.
3 participants spent around 4 hours on this work, which was easy to complete. After hollowing out the log, the inside of the log was burned out to remove any contamination caused by the chain oil from the saws. The next step is to provide the tree cavity with a solid roof and a floor with a base frame. We will continue to report. Finally, it should be noted that the work is not only meaningful but also brought a lot of joy to those present. In the coming spring, a new colony of bees will move into the cave, which we are placing directly on the foundation's research base.
Recommended for imitation. Kind regards and be(e) good,
Klaus Heinzel
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