Movable Observation Beehive

General Bee Chat
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A great tip for any new beekeeper would be to have one of these easy to make, inexpensive movable observation beehives. Ideal to observe for yourself what goes on inside a beehive, especially the brood. Fantastic to show friends & children. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wUlTw50b9vQ

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Hi Stephen, thanks for adding your opinion, I guess we can’t agree on everything:) I just think new beekeepers have more intelligence than you seem to be crediting them with.

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You will learn more about bees in a year of watching an observation hive than in 10 years of having them in hives in your backyard. A new beekeeper is likely to kill a hive or two. Why not learn 100 times as much in the process? And they might, with the constant feedback that observing them offers, manage not to kill them.

http://www.bushfarms.com/beesobservationhives.htm
http://www.bushfarms.com/beesnewbees.htm#observationhive

But three of four frames will have a much better chance of doing well than one. One is really only useful for demonstrations and talks and maybe a farm stand for a day.

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I made that video 2 yrs ago. Shortly after that I made it into 3 frames with the idea of using a full frame in the middle & a foundationless frame either side, mainly to stop the bees building on the perspex. It’s still going strong today. Needless to say, I’m constantly weakening it. One thing I did learn from starting this hive is you only need one frame of brood & bees with a queen at the start of spring to get a hive going.

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Then they will get over their “hands off approach” as they should.

They need to start viewing bees as bees do–as a superorganism… not as individuals.

The sooner they get over these illusions the better off they will be.

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This is Celia Davis

and her daughter Sarah from out Solihull group with their observation hive at a local fair recently (August 2015).

Celia puts the Queen and 2 frames, one brood and one super in her OH. She does this the morning of the show.

And bonus there was a one drone in there. The Queen was marked that morning so she stood out - The kiddies loved it

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Hi Dexter, Michael answered those questions far more eloquently than I could have. Even if a new (keen to learn all about bees) beekeeper had one of these on loan for a while, he/she could sit there for hours, as I did, watching the bees do everything you read about. From the communication, cleanliness, wax building, queen laying, brood feeding, wax flakes. The thing that I saw that I thought was most incredible was bees working as a team to move air around inside the hive during hot weather. You wont see that in a temporary display hive. The beauty of my display hive is, it’s a working hive. If you sell honey at the door as I do, you can show any interested people, especially kids what goes on inside a hive. I get many wows at the point of removing the ply cover. The other thing is it’s inexpensive to make, plus it’s easy to take anywhere.