Gourd, basket and improvised hives
Whatever 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.
Current status
Widespread living practice
Practised across a substantial area by many communities, and currently documented.
In current use across Africa and South Asia and reported in development-sector hive surveys, which count them precisely because projects try to replace them.
The improvised end of the spectrum
A hive needs to be a dry, dark, defensible cavity of roughly the right volume with a small entrance. Everything else is refinement. Large gourds, coiled grass baskets plastered with dung, unglazed pots laid on their sides, split oil drums, tea chests and offcut timber boxes all meet the specification and all are documented in current use.
Where these appear, they are usually the commonest hive locally by number, because they cost nothing and can be made in an afternoon from what is to hand.
Why they are absent from the record
What a project sees, and what it misses
Development programmes count these hives because their purpose is usually to replace them, and the counts are consequently among the better data on how many hives of any kind exist in a district. The replacement logic is that a frame hive yields more; the counter-argument is that it costs money, needs foundation and inspection, and returns nothing extra if the bees abscond.
Where the local bee absconds readily and the market for honey is local, a free hive that produces a little is frequently the better economic choice. That is a calculation rather than a preference, and it is why improved hives have been distributed and abandoned repeatedly in the same regions.
Siting
Improvised hives are placed wherever the beekeeper can defend and reach them: under eaves, on platforms, in hedges, in trees. Siting is doing much of the work that hive design does elsewhere, and it is the part that transfers least well when a project supplies equipment without local knowledge.
What this page does not claim
That these forms are recent or a degradation. Gourds and coiled baskets are old hive materials; the oil drum is new and the principle is not. Nor is the improvisation a mark of poverty in itself — a cheap hive that works is a rational choice.
In short
- A dry dark cavity of roughly the right size is the whole specification.
- Gourds, baskets, pots and drums are often the commonest hives locally by number.
- They are under-recorded because they are not picturesque.
Sources
- Bees and their role in forest livelihoods — Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (2009) · Industry body
- Bees and Beekeeping: Science, Practice and World Resources — Heinemann Newnes (1990) · Monograph
How sources are selected and weighted is set out in the sources and evidence policy.