The Ideal Honey Bee Home Part 1

When you are watching honey bees grapple with flowers in your garden you might find yourself thinking that there isn’t much going on in their tiny heads. We’ll never know exactly what or how bees think but we do know that they know how to take care of themselves and their bee families. Bees know how to find flowers, how to communicate their finds back to their sisters and how to construct complex hives. However I think that one of the most impressive feats of cognition honey bees are capable of is determining what will and will not make a good home for them.

Honey bees prefer a cavity approximately 40 liters in size. Any smaller and the bees won’t have enough space to store the honey that they need to survive the long winter. Any bigger and the bees are likely to waste resources on warming, cooling and defending a large space. They also need a place with a restricted entrance. If honeybees built their hives out in the open it would be much easier for enterprising predators to snack on bees or their hard earned honey. An enclosed space with a small entrance allows the bees to create their own gated communities where they only allow in members of their bee family.

Because of these preferences bees often need to be removed from under siding or covered decks. If bees can find a small hole in the side of your house an create a 40 liter void behind it then they may find it a perfect location to set up shop. It is not uncommon to see bees have pulled out insulation from inside a wall in order to give themselves more elbow room to expand their colony.