Have you any idea what this is?
We have over 7000 square meters of terraced land here, mainly populated with orange trees and I had the bright idea to try and produce honey.
About eighteen months ago I came across a site called The Barefoot Beekeeper. describing a version of bee hive called a top bar hive. This method of managing bees is said to be far more bee-friendly than normal bee hives and far easier to make. The site has a free download with the plans to make one or as in my case make four.
I carefully followed the measurements which are apparently the measurements bees use! And placed the hives around the land.
The next step was to get some bees, this was when I found out that bees worldwide are dying out!
No one is quite sure what is actually going on, it appears that across the world bees are becoming less disease resistant and colonies are struggling to survive.
So when I was looking to buy bees no one had any to sell.
While driving along a country track I came across a couple of old Spanish guys cleaning out an old bee hive and asked them where they got their bees. I didn’t realise that the old Spanish way of beekeeping was to entice a new swarm every year and then take all their honey at the end of the season leaving them with nothing to eat.
I was a bit shocked and confused, how do you entice a swarm to come and live in your hive? These two guys finished cleaning their various designs of hive, one of which was just a large piece of cork bent over to give the impression it was a hollowed out log, and after setting them out got  a yellow pot of magic bee potion to smear over the entrances to attract bees.
Its strange how life just somehow fills the gaps, so anyway off to the beehive shop I went to get some yellow magic bee potion, (lemon grass oil in a gel ) smeared it on my hives and waited, and waited and waited and eventually gave up.
So for a year those four hives have stood on the land empty.
Why am i writing this then? well today I was working on the land and guess what, we have two hives full of bees!