A lightweight, Easy-build, Biodegradable, Pallet Wood Refuge Hive

I am a beekeeper who has never bought a bee, not a package or a nucleus or a queen in a cage. All my bees have been taken as swarms and I have never requeened a colony with a mated queen. I recognise that I can only ‘keep’ my bees in this way if there is a good stock of local bees in the surrounding area. Some beekeepers have considered feral colonies to be unhygienic or a source of nuisance swarms or bad genes or even to have died out altogether but I want to see wild colonies thriving and plentiful both for myself and for the health of all the natural environment. Round here that means providing cavities for them to occupy, like nesting boxes for birds.

Inspired by the Abbé Warré and his low cost Peoples Hive, Sam Comfort’s dumpster hives, log hives, refuge hives and Jonathan Powell’s Lockdown Pallet Hive I have made a prototype hive with the following characteristics:

• A refuge type hive for wild honey bees without the need to inspect.

• Minimal cost and easy to build.

• Made entirely from waste wood, namely two old pallets.

• 100% biodegradable, so the hive can be put out in the countryside and left.

• Light weight so it can be carried by one person and lifted easily into a tree.

Construction and Design

The main hive cavity is an octagonal space with the boards held together by glueing further boards across the joins on the outside. Screws are used for assembly but they can all be removed as the glue sets. With several layers of pallet boards a good thickness of wood and air gaps will give a fair amount of insulation. Any one joint can fail and the hive will still retain its structure. My hive was made with three sets of eight boards but additional boards round the outside would increase the insulation of the walls and protect the inner boards from the weather.

Three roofs mean that each one protects the one below, hopefully prolonging the life of the hive and giving good insulation. The bee entrance is through gaps in the hive bottom. The three roof layers and the hive bottom are secured with wooden pegs, but could very easily be held with screws or nails if making the hive 100% biodegradable is less important to you.

To back up the glued joints the hive is bound around the outside with a couple of lengths of natural fibre rope, and sat on a convenient tree branch before being secured from falling by another length of natural rope.

The outside of the hive could be treated with preservative or conventional paint but I am confident that positioned well off the ground with a design allowing for rainwater to run off and plenty of ventilation the bare wood will last well.

Building Step by Step

The first job is to break down the pallets. I find it’s really hard to get them apart with pry bars without splitting the wood and wasting a lot of bits so I simply cut through the nails with an old hand saw and then drive the nails out with a hammer and punch. You might want to wash and scrub the wood down and let it dry. You might want to straighten the edges of some boards but there is no requirement for great accuracy. Sort the boards into sets of eight of the same width, at least 24 in total and the first set needs to be 100mm wide

You will need a table saw to chamfer two edges of each board at an angle of 22.5 degrees, leaving about half the board thickness at the edge.

Cut the first set of eight boards to length, square at each end. If they are 100mm wide then 900mm length will give you a nearly ideal internal volume of 43 litres. The next set of eight needs to be longer, allowing for a rebate of 30mm at the top and maybe 50mm at the bottom, plus whatever shape you want to give the bottom edge. I cut points on them to encourage rainwater to drip. The third set can be a little longer still.

Assemble the main barrel of the hive starting by running a generous bead of waterproof PVA along the chamfered edges of the first two boards and then screwing one of the second set of boards across the join. Make sure the top end of the second set overhangs by about 30mm to make a rebate into which you will fit the inner hive roof. It’s best to pre drill so that the screws squeeze the joint together well. Work your way around until you have a complete barrel and when the glue is dry remove the screws and repeat to fix the next set of eight boards to the outside.

The roof needs to be as impenetrable as possible to rainwater and insulated against winter heat loss and summer sun. It would be easy to make a waterproof roof with some modern materials or a couple of slates but to keep the hive 100% biodegradable I glued together the sawn edges of leftover pallet parts to make three wide boards. The first sits in the internal rebate formed by the different lengths of the side pieces. The second covers the top of the hive barrel and the third forms an umbrella over everything. Not wanting to use metal fixings the three roof boards were strongly fixed by driving square wooden pegs into round holes with a squirt of glue in the hole each time. If your hive is going in a tree you aren’t likely to be able to position it perfectly upright, so there is no need to make the roof sloped.

Before fixing the hive floor it’s a good idea to bait the interior with a good splashing of melted old beeswax and propolis to make the space smell good to bee scouts. I am sure that flying bees recognise the smells of the landscape they pass over and know where other colonies are sited. They will already know the location of your hive before they begin to prepare to swarm. The hive floor has gaps for the bee entrance. They need to be plenty wide enough to let drones and queens through, so at least 9mm.

To help with carrying the hive and to hold the body of it together extra securely some 8mm manilla rope was tied around the hive at the top and bottom. The knot for this is a constrictor knot which will tighten as you pull on the ends of the rope but won’t easily come loose. It’s a dangerous knot not taught to Boy Scouts (never tie one around your finger!) but the internet being what it is instructions are easy to find. Manilla rope is said to be the most durable of natural fibre ropes and it will shrink when wetted so it will end up tighter still around the hive. Cut ends of Manilla rope need to be tied with twine and another constrictor knot to prevent them from fraying.

That’s the job done!

Positioning

The hive weighs 23kg so one person can easily walk a short distance with it on the shoulder and it can go in the boot of an ordinary car. There’s no need for a truck or for any special lifting equipment. We wanted the hive to be in some local woodland away from roads and footpaths and we weren’t keen to climb trees so we simply found a small oak with a V at a good height, sat the hive in it and tied it to the more upright trunk with another length of natural rope.

I will be keeping an eye on it and hope to see bees in it in the Spring. I have no doubt that the powerful aroma of wax and propolis will make it irresistible to them. I am interested to see how long it lasts as a viable bee cavity. I would be disappointed if it didn’t last five years and very pleased if it lasted more than ten. Twenty years and there should be no trace of it but we will have to wait and see.