Episode 288: Hosting Bees

This week, my guest is bee expert Kevin Hancock. Kevin has invented a honeybee nest box that’s the only self-regulating honey harvesting system in the world, meaning the bees will dictate how much honey you can take dependent on the environment that year. It’s a way of hosting rather than keeping bees and is an intriguing system.   About the Eco Beehive    “ECO BEEHIVE is the only SELF REGULATING HONEY HARVESTING SYSTEM IN THE WORLD!     Wow that is so exciting!! But it is !! no really.. give me a chance and I'll explain.   I am on a mission to strengthen the honeybee network across Europe!!  You are automatically involved.   First. What is strengthening the honeybees network?  Honeybees don’t live in isolation. They are all interconnected though a network of colonies. No beekeeper is in isolation. Whatever they do impacts on the greater network around them.   OK so why? To get more colony’s in the environment. Not apiaries. More hives spread out creates a network of interconnected nests, results in stronger genetics. Faster response to problems like predation and sickness, across the network. The problem is the network has collapsed. You can affect change by installing honeybees nest boxes. I recommend my nest box:     Where did it all start you ask? Well as a little boy helping with the bees on my Grandfather’s farm in Africa, to catching my first swarm when I was about twelve years old. This then sparked the interest and evolved into my hobby of beelineing (tracking bees to find wild colonies).    My story makes me uniquely qualified to design and build the ECO- BEEHIVE. With an interest in bees ( Apis mellifera ) not beekeeping! My interest is mostly investigating bees in the wild.  These little insects are under pressure from all sorts of thing. But simplest of these to fix and something we can all get involved in and help with is to simply give them a safe, natural home to live.  Solving this simple but big problem, is my mission! After trying many different designs over quite a few decades, and using all the data I have collected from observing bees, I have developed a nest that is so convincing, to bees, they will just move in on their own! But more impressive is they will stay, But even more impressive, is they will then thrive. This then is the ECO--BEEHIVE.   www.gardenersbeehive.com     Other episodes if you liked this one:   Urban Bees - My guest this week is urban apiculturist Mark Patterson. Mark founded and runs Apicultural where he work with businesses and communities to invest in natural capital, improving the environment for pollinators and delivering pollinator monitoring surveys for clients. He provides honey bee hive management solutions, beekeeping training and education and also supplies quality urban honey to a select group of establishments. So you’d think Mark would be all for the idea of urban honeybees, right? Listen on…   
Looking Out for Bumblebees - This episode my guest is Gill Perkins, CEO of the Bumblebee Conservation Trust. We talk about bumblebee populations and habitats, what we can do to encourage and care for bumblebees in our gardens and about the role of bumblebees in tomato pollination, which came as a complete surprise to me!   Support the podcast on Patreon