Shirley GC in Warwickshire have started a new project on their path to sustainability and the ladies have started building their own Warré Beehives. “The hives are really expensive to buy, as it’s a more unusual hive type – not as readily available as some of the conventional hives. So we thought, perhaps we could build our own and save some money,” Wenke Gold explains.

Wenke is a member as well as the beekeeper at Shirley GC. She had been looking for local carpenters to help build beehives, when Shirley’s current chairwoman, Sheila Armstrong, mentioned she had a wood workshop in her garage. The ladies combined forces and Sheila is now teaching the younger generation how to use the equipment.

We’re hoping to move the wood workshop to the Golf Club and get more members involved. Some ladies have already expressed an interest in joining in. The tools make it so much easier to produce things ourselves at a fraction of the cost.

For anyone interested in building Warré Hives, here is a link to detailed building instructions. There are also some good YouTube Videos available.

https://warre.biobees.com/warre_hive_plans_metric.pdf

A Warré Hive stacks slightly smaller boxes on top of each other than a conventional hive, allowing bees to control the temperature in the hive better. It uses top bars rather than frames, so bees can build wild comb and live more naturally. Wild comb allows them to defend the hive better and helps keep the thermodynamics in the hive at optimal conditions.

The top box gets harvested once a year. Other than that, there is no interference with the hive. We trust that the bees have survived changing conditions on this planet for around 8 billion years and started to decline when humans started to manage them. Rewilding the honey bee is just one way of retracing our steps back to a more nature-centred way of being.

For those not in a position to have hives on their course, planting pollinators is the best way of supporting our local wild bee and honey bee populations.

For any questions or to book a bee talk for your club, contact Wenke Gold at wenkelanghof@gmail.com.