The Apiculture Art of Moving Bee Hives

Here is an article written by Rika. She takes care of the environmental aspects of BeeLife.

Rika shares her experience of living and working with bees based on the ancient Balinese bee keeping ways.

On October 15th 2022, the Bee Life Global team visited an ecotourism project in Wanagiri, Buleleng. The project is on a high hill surrounded by big trees; a lovely location for bees to play and make hives. The project’s intention is to create comfortable houses in the middle of the forest so guests can experience living in nature, in close connection to bees.

The project’s owner had placed hollowed tree trunks on living trees. These attract bees because they make perfect hives and it is the ancient Balinese way of making bee hives. These hollowed, tree trunk, hives already had bees making homes inside and it was our task to start moving them. We wanted to move them closer to the houses to make it easier to monitor and maintain the bees and their hives. Before proceeding with this task, we needed to confirm that the bees had been in these hives for at least one month. The colony needed to be pretty big in order to move them securely.

Moving the bees needed to be done around noon whilst the worker bees were still outside looking for nectar and pollen. We could move the bee hive from the tree with a unique technique which required safety tools. We had to move it very slowly and only 5 meters each day to make sure the GPS’s of the worker bees could still receive the signal from the queen bee in the hive.

The project owner was very happy with the procedure because he learned new techniques for moving the beehive. The project area was large, around 2 hectares, and most of the space was dedicated to various flowers and plants that produce nectars and pollens for the bees.

The BeeLife Global team was so happy with the project. It preserves bees and provides an experience for people to see a different perspective about living with bees. This kind of project promotes living in harmony with nature and the bees whilst creating community.