Housing and keeping bees
Giving bees somewhere to live and then working with them — the container, the siting, the calendar and the ownership.
40 practices · what it is for
- Ogiek forest honey and hive rightsBeekeeping tradition · Practised, decliningLog hives hung in the Mau forest, marked and inherited, and a legal case in which forest beekeeping was treated as evidence of indigenous land rights. The clearest example anywhere of a honey practice becoming a matter of law.
- Tikung boardsBeekeeping tradition · Local living practiceShaped planks hung in seasonally flooded forest in West Kalimantan for giant honey bees to build on. The bees are entirely wild, the boards are owned and inherited, and the arrangement is neither hunting nor hive beekeeping.
- Rafter beekeeping in the Mekong deltaBeekeeping tradition · Local living practiceAngled poles set in melaleuca forest in southern Vietnam, inviting giant honey bees to build where they can be worked. The same solution as tikung, arrived at in a different forest with a different tree.
- Fixed-comb hivesHive system · Widespread living practiceThe category almost every traditional hive belongs to: the bees attach comb directly to the container, so it cannot be lifted out. That single fact determines how the hive is harvested, whether it can be inspected, and why harvesting was destructive for most of history.
- Log hivesHive system · Widespread living practiceA hollowed section of trunk, closed at both ends, with a small flight hole. The most widespread hive form on earth, in continuous use from Ethiopia to the Himalaya to the Yucatán, and the direct ancestor of both the Egyptian clay cylinder and the modern top-bar hive.
- Bark hivesHive system · Widespread living practiceA cylinder of bark stripped whole from a living tree, sewn or pegged into a tube and hung high in the miombo woodland. It supports one of the largest traditional beekeeping economies anywhere, and it raises a genuine and much-argued question about the trees.
- Clay and pottery hivesHive system · Practised, decliningHorizontal cylinders of fired or unfired clay, stacked in rows and worked from the rear. The best-evidenced ancient hive on earth, for one reason: it is the only material that survives, so the archaeological record of hives is really the record of this design.
- Straw skepsHive system · RevivedA dome of coiled straw bound with split bramble, the standard European hive for centuries and the reason the beehive symbol looks the way it does. It ended not because it stopped working but because it could not be inspected for disease.
- Bee bolesHive system · HistoricalRecessed alcoves built into garden and field walls to shelter skeps from rain and wind. Thousands survive across Britain and Ireland, and they are the only physical evidence of beekeeping in many places that left no documents at all.
- Wall hivesHive system · Practised, decliningA cavity built into the wall of a house during construction, with a flight hole outside and an access panel indoors. Common across the Himalaya, parts of the Middle East and the Mediterranean, and still occupied in older buildings.
- Hung cylinder hivesHive system · Widespread living practiceCylinders of bark, bamboo, basketry or hollowed wood, sealed with dung and hoisted high into trees away from the homestead. The dominant form in Ethiopia and across much of East Africa, and the reason harvesting there is a climb.
- Gourd, basket and improvised hivesHive system · Widespread living practiceWhatever holds a cavity. Gourds, coiled baskets sealed with dung, upturned pots, oil drums and packing cases are the commonest hives in several countries and almost never appear in accounts of traditional beekeeping.
- Cork hivesHive system · Practised, decliningCylinders of cork bark, used across the western Mediterranean wherever cork oak is worked. Excellent insulation, effectively free where the forestry already exists, and a good illustration of hive design following local material.
- Collective apiariesHive system · Practised, decliningPurpose-built shared structures holding hundreds of family-owned hives, with allocation, maintenance and guarding organised communally. Documented in the Maghreb, southern Arabia and central Europe, and among the most striking pieces of beekeeping architecture anywhere.
- Top-bar hivesHive system · Widespread living practiceA horizontal hive in which bees build comb down from removable bars rather than into frames. Developed in the 1960s and 1970s as an intermediate technology, with a Greek movable-comb precedent from around 1800, and neither traditional nor a frame hive.
- MeliponicultureStingless-bee keeping · RevivedKeeping stingless bees for honey, wax-resin and pollination, in log sections, clay pots or purpose-built boxes. Practised independently across the Neotropics, Australia, Southeast Asia and parts of Africa, and constrained everywhere by the same biological limit.
- Maya meliponicultureStingless-bee keeping · Practised, decliningKeeping Melipona beecheii in hollow-log hives across the Yucatán peninsula: a fully documented pre-Columbian apiculture with its own hive, its own ceremonies and its own colonial tribute record, now reduced to a fraction of the colonies recorded two generations ago.
- The jobónHive system · Practised, decliningA hollowed log section closed with discs at both ends, stacked horizontally on racks under a shelter. The hive of Maya meliponiculture, and a design that solves the specific problem of harvesting a nest built in pots rather than in comb.
- The decline of Yucatán meliponicultureStingless-bee keeping · RevivedOne of the few cases anywhere in which the ending of a cultural practice has been measured rather than described. Colony counts across the Yucatán peninsula, repeated decades apart, document a steep fall — and give the reasons.
- Brazilian meliponicultureStingless-bee keeping · Widespread living practiceThe largest organised stingless-beekeeping sector in the world: many species kept in rational box hives, a legal framework governing colony keeping and movement, and the biggest research community working on any of this.
- Australian native bee keepingStingless-bee keeping · Widespread living practiceKeeping Tetragonula and Austroplebeia in purpose-built boxes across eastern and northern Australia. A modern hobbyist and pollination sector, distinct from — and sometimes in tension with — the Aboriginal sugarbag tradition it sits alongside.
- Kelulut keepingStingless-bee keeping · Widespread living practiceStingless beekeeping across Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand that has expanded rapidly from a traditional base into a commercial sector, bringing with it price premiums, health claims and an authenticity problem arriving at the same speed.
- Philippine stingless beekeepingStingless-bee keeping · Widespread living practiceKeeping Tetragonula biroi in boxes across the Philippines, driven by university research programmes and by demand for pollination in mango and coconut. A young sector built partly on older Indigenous knowledge of the same bee.
- Nile valley beekeepingBeekeeping tradition · Practised, decliningStacked horizontal clay cylinders worked from the rear, moved along the river to follow flowering. Depicted from the third millennium BCE and still recognisable in twentieth-century Egyptian practice, which makes it one of the longest documented continuities in beekeeping.
- Ethiopian beekeepingBeekeeping tradition · Widespread living practiceOne of the largest hive populations of any country, worked with hung cylindrical hives in trees away from the homestead, supplying a honey-wine culture with a documented place in religious and social life.
- Tree beekeepingBeekeeping tradition · RevivedCavities cut into living pines high above the ground, worked from a climbing rope, with the colony otherwise left to itself. The largest beekeeping system of medieval eastern and central Europe, lapsed almost entirely in the twentieth century and deliberately restarted in the last two decades.
- Zeidler forest beekeepingBeekeeping tradition · HistoricalForest beekeepers in medieval central Europe holding defined rights, obligations and in places their own jurisdiction. The clearest case anywhere of honey production organised as an institution rather than as a household activity.
- Bashkir tree beekeepingBeekeeping tradition · Local living practiceCut cavities in living pines in the Burzyan forests of the southern Urals, worked with a dark forest bee and a climbing strap. One of very few tree-beekeeping traditions that did not lapse, and the practice the Polish revival drew on.
- Keeping the Asian honey beeBeekeeping tradition · Widespread living practiceLog hives, wall cavities and box hives for Apis cerana across South, Southeast and East Asia. A different animal from the western honey bee in ways that break European management assumptions, and the reason imported frame-hive advice so often fails.
- Japanese box-hive beekeepingBeekeeping tradition · Local living practiceStacked wooden boxes for Apis cerana japonica, harvested once a year by taking the top box. A minority practice alongside a much larger introduced Apis mellifera sector, sustained partly by a bee that can defend itself against giant hornets.
- Southern Arabian log-hive beekeepingBeekeeping tradition · Local living practiceHollow-log and stone-cavity hives stacked in walls and moved between wadis to follow the sidr flowering, producing one of the most expensive honeys in world trade.
- Moving hives to follow floweringBeekeeping tradition · Widespread living practiceCarrying colonies to successive flowerings — up a mountain, down a river, across a region — long before lorries. The direct ancestor of industrial migratory pollination, and a practice with a documented history in the Mediterranean, the Nile valley and Arabia.
- Slovenian bee houses and painted panelsBeekeeping tradition · Local living practiceStacked box hives in a purpose-built shed, with the front board of each hive painted with folk narrative, satire and religion. A folk art form that exists because of a hive design, and a beekeeping culture with unusual institutional continuity.
- Korean mountain beekeepingBeekeeping tradition · Practised, decliningKeeping the native Asian honey bee in log and plank hives in the mountain villages of Korea, harvested once a year in autumn. A tradition defined by a bee that resists intensive management and by the forest it depends on.
- Miombo woodland beekeepingBeekeeping tradition · Widespread living practiceHanging bark cylinders in the miombo woodlands of south-central Africa, in numbers, and selling the honey and wax into a trade that has run for well over a century. One of the largest traditional beekeeping economies anywhere.
- The Langstroth hiveHive system · Widespread living practiceA box of hanging frames spaced so the bees leave the gaps clear, which lets a keeper lift out a single comb without destroying anything. The design most of the world's managed colonies now live in.
- Migratory beekeepingBeekeeping tradition · Widespread living practiceLoading colonies onto vehicles and moving them to a crop or a honey flow. An old idea — the Nile and the Mediterranean did it by boat — running today at continental scale on lorries.
- Commercial pollinationBeekeeping tradition · Widespread living practiceRenting colonies to growers for the duration of a bloom, under contract, at a price per hive. For many large operations it is now the main revenue line and honey is the by-product.
- Queen rearing and the bee tradeBeekeeping tradition · Widespread living practiceProducing queens and bees as products in their own right — grafted queens, packages in the post, nucleus colonies — which is what lets an industry replace its losses on a schedule.
- Urban beekeepingBeekeeping tradition · Widespread living practiceHives on roofs, balconies, allotments and hotel terraces. Genuinely productive, socially useful, and routinely justified with a biodiversity argument the evidence does not support.