The Hive Architect: Saving Britain's Wild Bees

There's a few guards out there like rock violets in there just like... Lunch? Like a broken man. Where did this whole ******* idea start? That's the thing. I was the classic kid who wanted to catch things. I was catching butterflies, I was catching frogs. We found this amazing nest in a tree and we thought if we tie a spoon to a stick, shove it in the hole, we can come out with honey. So of course, you know, I did and got absolutely stung to bits. I guess I'm a wild honeybee conservationist. In some ways I'm just going back to being a kid again. Like many people I guess we're worried about biodiversity decline and we all want to start doing our bit and so I thought I'd become a beekeeper and very quickly realized it's quite an intensive hobby. Really you're interfering and manipulating bees constantly. Bethany really was finding wild nests in trees and actually just seeing that the bees survive. Our reaction was to find a tree trunk, hollow it out, put it up into the tree. Two weeks later my young kid came back running. The bees have come, the bees have come. But it's that kind of excitement of seeing bees come in, choose something that you've made, very different from catching a swarm and pushing them in. And so that's what's happened. I thought we'll make another one and I've been doing that ever since. So a log hive is basically a hollow log. The cavity is about the diameter of my hand span and then it has a few entrance holes in it for the bees to find it and it has a top with some insulation on that to keep things warm and then a removal base which is really purely for me because I love looking at the comb build coming down. But it's not just the honey we're interested in, you know bees are living there year after year and we just need to provide habitat. Luckily enough I've got a workshop at home. Instead of October I'll spend a month just on hackle making. It actually takes longer to make a hackle than it does to hollow a log. The reed comes from Norfolk and then the legs are made out of sweet chestnut which is coppice from the Weald of Kent. It's basically you know the reed you see growing in estuaries it's just got higher silicon than straw so it lasts a lot longer. I'm very careful about where I buy my materials from to these hives that is sustainable and I try and get 30 or 40 of those made and stored. When that's finished the logs should come and then I'm into the log hollowing. It's just nice to get a bit of chalk from the garden and that's that's my tally. This is this year's hackle count and then I'll probably I need to make probably another 20 on here. Growing up on a farm shearers always used to do the same thing with shearing sheep you'd have a tally board. You know with the noise and the chainsaw and everything else I soon got banished from the village and had to go up and find a farm to work on. The farmer's kindly lent me his Dutch barn which is about a quarter mile up the road so it's got plenty of space I can make as much noise as I want. So the process really is to roll these heavy things up onto a trestle. The diameter really of the logs is associated to the diameter of the cavity that I'm making. Fundamentally it's about insulation and it's thermodynamics and then with a chainsaw I can basically cut a square hole through from working either end with the saw and that leaves me with four segments that have to be cut out. And for me the easiest way still is to do it with these six foot long gouges. This one was made by a guy in his late 70s a guy called Hector Cole who's like the master blacksmith in the country. This one's made by a younger guy who's in his 30s and it's a little bit cruder it's just squashed the steel but actually it's my favourite gouge now so. But it's just having that steel gives momentum when you're when you're doing it. You know I'm getting old so if I can get four logs done, log, tea break, log, lunch, log, tea break, log, end of day. I've got a bit more it's a bit depressing sometimes you go around and there's still a bit more to go. It's like anyone who works outside and it's cold you're knackered and fall asleep in the tea but this time of year and then you have that extra energy in the summer. I quite like like all that. There's something really nice about getting a tree trunk and with a few tools a long gouge and a chainsaw I can do them. I can do them anywhere so it meant that I can teach other people so that the whole point is that I wasn't just this one person mission to save the planet. Basically around the first second of February is when you might get your first bit of pollen, a bit of hazel pollen or a bit of snow drops coming in and the bees are suddenly thinking about spring. The year moves quite quickly suddenly it'll be the end of April, May, the populations be large and they're thinking about splitting, reproducing and at which time I'll start putting the nests up in end of March, April so that there's new cavities for them to look for. We're in a farm in Wiltshire today where as the years pass the bees are going to be established here they're not moving anywhere and they're going to grow with the woodland. Well but one thing this woodland won't have perhaps for 100 or 150 years is habitat for bees you know I have a compass with me and what I want to do is set up the sort of entrance holes so they're looking sort of south, south east and one of the reasons for that is in say like February, March where you might just get sun briefly for an hour or so a day those bees are going to get that light. A bit like you know when we have a house it's quite nice to have the morning light to get Scratch it on like a crayon and it's really cool this is so this stuff I don't know if you can smell it but it's antibacterial, antimicrobial, antiviral it's like a super it's like effectively like an external immune system that the bees make. This is a real good stuff this is um propolis tincture so this is propolis dissolved in alcohol. So you just knock it out back? I knock it back and it just it's really good so that boosts our immune system. I love that. It's good stuff. Part of the whole process was working out by myself how to lift these you know logs that could be up to 80 kilos up into a tree or lifting a rocket hive which is again on legs a lot of weight to push up. Now I'm paying penance for I put these hives all around the country and I probably put up about 800 now and wherever I go bees come and they're surviving. Most of my life I've been building interiors of boats where beauty is very much part of of what I'm involved with so the idea of a log hive has still got to be a beautiful structure. I think by doing so the person who's investing money into it if they can have something that's beautiful in there on the land they're already sold you know the story's already there and they like it as a bit of sculpture and then when the bees come they're ecstatic. You have to keep pumping it otherwise just when you need it it dies out. I'm really trying to feel their mood if they're going to be aggressive then they'll come and get me now so still to this day there'll be beekeepers saying that wild bees don't exist and what I'm doing is actually aiding disease and affecting the British commercial bee colonies which of course is not true. I'm often asked what motivates me to do what I'm doing and it certainly isn't money and it certainly isn't an easy life you know I'm getting on a bit and it's physical work. Putting up these hives is great they're beautiful things getting bees is a really really important thing but what is exciting is that people start with the bees and then they're drawn into conserving everything else. People stop and look and allow themselves to stop long enough to start seeing other things. It might start with bees and from my point of view it's really important to think about the wild or the free living bee in terms of genetics. We need strong resilient bees but actually we also need people who are going to be switched on by everything else in nature and want to conserve and want to plant trees and look at butterflies look at fungi look at everything. That's been really powerful that I hadn't expected when I started this adventure 15 years ago. We're up against the bee industry but nature is telling us a different story every time we come across a nest that should be dead and it's just thriving it's just buzzing and you know I don't that's all you need you don't need someone you know in a hall telling you a bit of scientific nonsense that that doesn't exist we see it every day and that's what drives us to put more up. So I think you know earlier on I said I'm not a beekeeper and maybe I'm a honeybee conservationist but actually it's about everything.