Yeah I was just thinking before how many different styles of hives you could have. Like, Medieval hives, Warhammer hives, eve hives, HoN hives, Battlestar Galactica hives, Star Wars hives, Star Trek hives. Possibly a see through hive? (Even if it's tinted so it's still dark?) Or rather a death star hive or like Kim said, an Airport hive - Aircraft carrier hive would be more hardcore though.

My hives are about 3 metres apart and face south. Bees know their way home, but if you densely pack hives into a space they may struggle to determine which is their hive. Generally, keep them at least 1 metre apart.
If you can't do that, face them different directions to each other.
If that's not an option, bees can differentiate shape and colour, so put stickers above the hive entrances, my hives are not the same, so they'd be fine too, but when I get more hives I'll be getting more of the sort that doesn't have sloped sides, which would give the bees trouble.



This is how they roll in Slovakia. Different countries do things differently. I like the Slovak ones. This is the sort of thing I might consider building if I ever end up with a lot of land.

Do hives interact?
Usually not. They don't co-operate across hives, similarly they don't declare war on each other either. Let it be said that "There is no such thing as an asshole bee", the Aliens reference is good, because Ripley tells Burke that you don't see the Aliens fucking each other over for a percentage. Yeah, bees don't either.

If a bee ends up in the wrong hive, it will generally be ignored and allowed to recognise it's mistake and leave. If it doesn't it'll get balled.
Balling is how hives usually deal with intruders, they just smother them to death by a thousand wing tips. Some say the balling cooks the intruder, maybe it does, either way, it's what they do and it works for the most part.
I've read it's possible for bees to very rarely end up raiding another hive's food store, I didn't look further into it as it would be impossible(tm) for one of my hives to thrive on food and the other to be in famine, they both live in the same place and shouldn't happen. I'd question how it's even possible unless I stole all the honey from both and only placed artificial food in just one hive. That would of course be very stupid of me.

ok seriously aircraft carrier hive please

This isn't a bad idea. The bees certainly wouldn't mind or care. The funniest response would be from the old traditionalists that make up a lot of the beekeeping fraternity.

A quick look for decorative bee hives lead me to these two.

I find these bee based designs very tacky. A lot of place have bee souvenir type stuff for the home and it makes me feel bad. (In fact the place I bought my bees from was a scruffy shed which had all tatty dirty pinups on the wall - OF BEES. Oooooh Matron!)


These ones appeal to me more. Though not necessarily enough to go out and do that.

It's been a long time since I looked at Airfix kits...

isnt balling impossible vs other Bees

very cool hobby. very cool thread.

when i was a kid we had wasp nests around the outside of the house. when they weren't super active i would move them. i never got stung. my best friend was over once while i was doing this. they attacked him. no way i would do that now, but i've always got along better with wasps than bees.

any idea how you harvest wasp venom?

totally didn't double post or anything of the sort like a noob