An Indoor Beehive in My Bedroom Wall

Summary

Once again, I find myself gloriously behind the times. In this particular case, a few thousand years behind the times. I built and maintain a wall beehive — a colony housed in the wall of my bedroom. I have been calling it my Observation Hive because it has a plexiglas cover on the inside wall, but our ancient ancestors have been keeping such hives, called walled hives, for millennia. I know this now because of a fascinating Bee World article from 1998 by Eva Crane that details wall hives and wall hive beekeeping in some twenty warm-temperate Old World countries, a practice that dates back to at least 60 CE. Indoor bees. They smell great, they sing me to sleep, and they teach me something new every day. My beekeeping friend Jenne Johnson is great at finding and sharing such wonderful bee morsels as she wanders along the good bee road, and she managed to find this historical reference to my very new activity. Dreaming of living with bees For the past few years, I have dreamed of living with bees closer than my yard. I imagined and tried out a few ghastly attempts at indoor colonies with bees who were failing, and continued to fail when I brought them indoors. I call this my “bee hospice phase.” Then I got the notion to simply put them in my walls, an idea probably sparked by my obsession with my friend Jacqueline’s wall hive that has been living in the brick walls of her hallway for more years than she remembers. Her hive has no inside access or viewport, but you can hear the bees humming through the wood paneling. Indoor beehive installation So, last winter, I had two young carpenters cut out the sheetrock and the insulation between two framing studs in my bedroom wall by the window. They added an inch-wide hole for a three-inch length of bamboo on the outside of the wall which the bees could use for an outside entry/exit. Randy and Todd cut up… Inside, the fellows cleaned the cavity down to its original 1930s wood and shingling. We added a piece of plexiglass with ...