Comments on: Urban Beehive for Design Loving Beekeepers

By: The Year’s 20 Best: Urban Gardens 2012 Roundup! | Urban Gardens | Unlimited Thinking For Limited Spaces | Urban Gardens

Mon, 31 Dec 2012 18:13:20 +0000

[...] 11. Urban Beehive For Design-Loving Beekeepers [...]

By: Agen Bola

Agen Bola — Fri, 17 Aug 2012 06:24:42 +0000

What an incredible idea! I can see this reinventing Main Street.

By: Robin Plaskoff Horton

Robin Plaskoff Horton — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 23:03:52 +0000

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By: Lisa

Lisa — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 05:15:15 +0000

1) The combs must be vertical.
2) Queen bees do not like light.
3) The comb sheets need to be closer together to avoid abnormal comb architecture.
4) Who, in their right mind, would try to extract honey from a hive that’s inside their home?

By: Robert, the Oxford Garden Project

Robert, the Oxford Garden Project — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 17:23:43 +0000

Agreed, a beautiful CONCEPT design, and the world needs more of them, but, unfortunately, also agreed that it is totally impractical PRODUCTIVE hive. I believe when I first saw this some months ago on Philips concept site, the idea was to pull the bottom cord and honey would flow out. If only it were that simple! I would love one of these as an OBSERVATION hive at the project, but its lack of expandability and construction would give serious practical problems, and if you don’t want to share a room with lots of justifiably angry bees wanting their honey back, you shouldn’t even contemplate opening it up! Whether you want to practice “traditional” beekeeping to obtain honey, or “natural” beekeeping to provide a home for the bees there are many more practical, and undoubtedly cheaper, ways of doing it, even in an urban environment.

By: Larry

Larry — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 13:19:35 +0000

This picture also shows obvious deception. The comb shown does not hang straight down. All beekeepers know that bees build their comb straight down. It might be curved, but hangs straight down. So the comb shown in this cavity was more likely hanging so that the part next to the wall was actually at the top when the comb was drawn out by the bees. This company should have tried installing it with bees, to let them draw out the comb in a more natural way. The bees will eventually create burr comb in this hive, as is, to compensate for the wrong angle of the present comb.

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Sun, 18 Dec 2011 21:13:03 +0000

[...] Urban Beehive for Design Loving Beekeepers [...]

By: Diana

Diana — Sat, 17 Dec 2011 13:30:30 +0000

Cool-looking, but as the link Kaveh shared says, this “hive” is desperately non-functional for many reasons. Since that blog post in the link pretty well covers most of the reasons, I won’t repeat them here, but I’ll add that a few things.
-As a beekeeper, I can tell you that there is no way to open that hive to “harvest honey” (which you wouldn’t be able to get from hive that small, anyway) without ending up with a few thousand bees flying around in your living room. Smoking calms them, yes, but doesn’t debilitate them! They still fly and walk all over!
-That hive is actually illegal in many/all(?) states. (I know it would not be allowed here in Illinois, where ALL beekeepers (even if you have just one hobby hive) must register with the Department of Agriculture annually.) Government regulations on beehives and apiaries states that individual frames of comb and brood must be accessible and removable for inspection. This hive does not allow that.
-The flower pot at the entrance to “attract bees.” Um, I’m sorry, but that, maybe more than anything, shows that the designer has not the first clue about bees. Bees visit approximately 2 MILLION flowers to make a single pound of honey, which isn’t much honey! That tiny pot isn’t going to grow much. (And anyone who gardens knows that a pot that small, outside, would be nigh-on impossible to keep watered!) Also, any bee that stops at that flower pot is going to be a forager, not a scout from a swarm looking for a new home. And even if a scout did somehow find that opening, it’s smooth and white and not at all what a bee is looking for. The likelihood that a swarm would find it and move in is pretty much zero.

Observation hives already exist, but they are not generally used as a permanent home for a colony of bees, for almost all of the same reasons this hive will not work.

By: Yaya

Yaya — Sat, 17 Dec 2011 04:46:03 +0000

What threw me off immediately is “allowing urban dwellers to harvest honey through the window of even a tiny city apartment.”

Since when has it been a good idea to open the lid of a beehive IN A TINY APARTMENT?! Even with smoke, that’s a terrible idea.

I could see this being used in a greenhouse maybe though. If it were a little larger. Bees need a bit more space.

By: Robin Plaskoff Horton

Robin Plaskoff Horton — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 16:29:00 +0000

Thank you Kaveh for this link. I have asked the folks at Philips Design to respond. I hope they will as I see many people would like to have the benefit of multiple points of view.