The population of honey bees is increasingly diminished due to the great impact that human exploitation has on them, causing the destruction of their habitat, as well as the introduction of invasive species and the use of pesticides and insecticides. Luckily, more and more people join the fight against these impacts, however, few are those who venture to collaborate in a direct way to increase the population of these insects, essential for the maintenance of thousands of species of phanerogams. (flowering plants), including plants that humans use as food.
One way to help is by building an artificial hive that, in addition to helping the ecosystem, is a very fun craft. So, if you want to know how to make a bee hive, we'll tell you about it in the next article on our site.
How do bees make hives?
Before starting with the construction of the honeycomb, we must understand how bees make their own hives naturally. The order Hymenoptera to which bees, wasps and ants belong is extremely broad (about 150,000 species) In this article we will focus on honey bees (Apis mellifera).
Honey bees can form a new colony by separating a small group from the original hive, thereby establishing a swarm of its own, this may be because the queen bee is too old or has died. Several scout bees will come out of the main group in search of a suitable place to establish the new honeycomb. When a bee finds a suitable place, it informs the others through a dance called “dance of the bees”, through which they transmit information to their companions. Normally, they establish themselves in a sheltered place (cracks in rocks or trees). Once the site where they will build the new hive has been chosen, the workers proceed to clean it and leave it ready.
Construction of the hive is a very complex task and the bees can achieve it because They are able to produce wax, together with plant secretions. All the work is done in groups, so the female bees collaborate in the construction together with the workers, and the former secrete the wax with which they will form the cells or cells that make up the hive. The cells are built one after the other, so each bee gives way to a partner and they all participate. The cells or cells have the shape of a hexagonal prism, and at the beginning of their construction, you can define two types of cells:
- Worker cells: one type is the worker cells, which are smaller in size and allow their movement.
- Storage cells: the other type is the storage cells, in which the honey will be deposited.
Once the task of building the cells and the entire hive is completed, the bees proceed to cover it with a substance called propolis. It is a resin (tree sap or other vegetable source) that the bees mix with wax and cover spaces or fissures that may have remained in the hive. This resin is also capable of providing protection to the hive against bacteria, parasites and other external factors, such as vibrations. The entire construction process can take about a week and once it's habitable, the bees continue to “remodel” or add cells.
If you are also curious about how bees make honey, we will explain it to you in this other article on our site on How do bees make honey?
How to make a bee hive?
As we said before, bees establish their hives in more or less protected spaces, so it will be essential that, when creating the design of our hive, it is formed by a closed structure and hidden from light direct. Although there are different designs, in this article we will show you a very simple way to make a beehive with pallets
The hive can be made of almost any material and size, so the amount of materials will depend on the space we have at our disposal or the number of hives we want to make.
This time we will learn how to make a large beehive with a pallet, and in this case we will use the design of a “Kenya beehive” or horizontal beehive. Next, we will detail the materials and the steps to create our beehive made with pallets:
Materials to make a bee hive
- 1 pallet.
- 1 board of wood, plastic or other material.
- 40 slats approximately 3 cm wide and 48 cm long (the easiest thing is to buy long slats and cut them to size).
- About 40 lag screws or nails. The ones on the pallet can be reused (we can also use glue or glue for wood, to make the joints more firm).
Tools to make a bee hive
- Drill or auger.
- Hammer.
- Protractor of angles (recommended).
- Rule.
- Lever or pliers.
Once we have chosen a medium and resistant pallet, we will have to disassemble it using a lever, hammer or pliers to remove the ends. When the pallet is disassembled, we will obtain the following:
- 8 long boards of 1, 20 m.
- 3 short boards of approximately 80 cm (we will cut them in half to get 6 boards of 40 cm).
- 4 tacos.
The measurements and the number of boards vary depending on the pallet, since the measurements can be adapted to the pallet you have on hand.
How to make a bee hive step by step
To make our homemade hive, we must do the following. But first, we must take into account the following:
- For the side layout, we will use 3 long horizontal boards joined by a vertical board in the center.
- For the lower board (floor of the hive) we will use the same procedure as for the sides, only instead of 3 boards long we will use 2 long boards joined by a slat.
- For the front and back, we will use 2 short boards (40 cm) placed horizontally and joined with 2 slats vertical (one on each side). On the front board we will use a drill or auger to make some holes through which the bees will enter (approximately 1 cm in diameter).
Now that we have all the planks we need for the cabin we start to assemble it:
- We will put the 4 plugs holding the floor or base, and we will join them with nails. At the ends of the base, we placed the back and front boards and attached them to the base.
- Now place the inclined sides (ideally, they should be at a 60º angle with respect to the base), so that they coincide at the same time with the base and with the upper corners of the front and back boards. rear (as if it were a funnel), and we join with nails (for greater accuracy, we can calculate the 60º inclination with an angle protractor). And we would already have the box in which our bees will live!
- Next, we only need to place the slats so that they end up covering the entire drawer as if it were a lattice (we may need more or less 40 slats, since it depends on the size of the pallet that we have used).
- Once this is done, the drawer that will be our hive will be ready and… we're done!
The bees will create their honeycombs from the slats that we have placed on the box and, if we have calculated the inclination correctly, it will not they will not stick to the walls, but will form them downwards in a wedge shape.
But did you know that bees are not the only pollinating animals? Discover other species that help pollinate the planet in this other article on 15 pollinating animals - Characteristics and examples!
How to attract bees to an empty hive?
If we want to get started in the world of beekeeping (that is, bee breeding and honey extraction) and we have already built our hive, now we have to attract them to their new home. There are several ways to attract them, here we will tell you about the most natural ones and one is through the use of imitation pheromones (attraction chemicals secreted by bees), that simulate the presence of a queen bee.
Along with this, it is also important that our hive is installed in an area where there is variety of flowers, especially those with bright colors. glades, and herbs such as rosemary and mint, which attract bees, as well as water sources near them, as they need moisture. And we must not forget to always use protective suits to avoid bites
Together, all this should be enough to attract the bees to their new home and we will be contributing to its conservation and that of the ecosystem, since bees play the important role of pollinating many species vegetables, as we explain in more detail in this other article on our site about The importance of bees.
