A New Home for our Bees!

A Golden Hive

The colony here at flour+water has been growing steadily over the course of the spring. It was only a matter of time before they outgrew the nucleus hive they’d started out in. We enlisted the help of our friend, Tabitha Solomon, to build the new hive we would eventually move the colony into.

The hive that Tabitha built is known as a Golden Hive. Its dimensions are based on the Golden Ratio - a mathematical proportion closely related to the Fibonacci sequence found to be expressed in various natural forms from pinecones, flowers and tree branches to the human body. The Fibonacci sequence can even be found inside the honey bee colony:  While the females in a colony both have two parents (a queen and a drone), the male bees are hatched from unfertilized eggs. The Fibonacci sequence is thereby expressed in the drone’s family tree: one parent, two grandparents, three great-grandparents, and so on!

Our decision to use this design over a more traditional one was based on our desire to provide the bees with an environment in which they could develop more naturally. As our primary goal is not to harvest honey but rather to observe and learn, we are less concerned with a system that allows for easy honey extraction and more interested in how bees live in nature without human interference. To this end, we are using foundation-less frames placed in a “one room” hive box – we are not using separate honey supers, brood boxes or queen excluders to divide the space within the hive. The bees have free range to raise brood and to store honey and pollen wherever they like. As the colony grows, I will add more frames.

In July we received our hive – Tabitha did an amazing job using locally sourced, untreated wood. Finally, it was time to move our friends into their new digs. We transferred the colony on a sunny day in July:

The transfer went smoothly and the colony looks happy, healthy and well prepared for the rainy winter months ahead!

hive entrance