Plastic hive is the bee’s knees
A new plastic beehive was launched in Britain on Wednesday to
encourage people to keep bees in their gardens or on rooftops to help
boost declining honeybee populations.
A bee flies into a “Beehaus” urban beehive at a garden allotment
in central London, on August 4. The new contemporary beehive
will make it easy for anyone to help bees find a home in urban
gardens around the country. The beehaus has twice the room of a
traditional hive (measuring about 1 metre wide and 0.5 m high)
and with good access to local sources of nectar it’s possible to
collect over 20kg of honey in a good year. AFP |
The bees seemed to like their ultra-modern home as they buzzed
happily in and out of the postbox-like slot in the grey and yellow
‘beehaus’ on the roof of state-backed conservation agency Natural
England’s London offices. The agency’s chief scientist Tom Tew said if
more urban residents kept honeybees, it would increase the insects’
numbers and make them more resilient to attacks from disease and pests
which threaten their survival.
“We need to recognise that if we want plants to flourish, we need
healthy populations of insects to sustain them,” Tew said. “There’s no
reason why our towns and cities should exist as wildlife deserts —
wildlife can thrive when we design our urban areas with nature in mind
and the ‘beehaus’ is a great example of how easy it is for anyone to
bring the natural world closer to their doorstep.”
Its makers Omlet claim that at one metre wide and 0.5 metres high
(three feet wide and one foot eight inches high), the ‘beehaus’ is twice
as big as a traditional beehive, giving plenty of room for the colony to
grow in comfort.
The number of honeybees in Britain has dropped by up to 15 percent in
the past two years, according to government figures, as they face a
growing range of diseases and wild flowers they feed on are wiped out by
urban development.
AFP |