Good Bugs – Bad Bugs

When I attend a show such as the San Francisco Flower & Garden Show, it always takes me a few days to digest all of the wonders I saw there. And this year, there were a few items that are still haunting me with their cleverness. Take, for example, the HexHive:

The idea here is that man has always made square hives for production of honey…but why? In nature, the circle and hexagon are the shapes bees create. Now, there are some people using these beautiful beehives and they are finding that the bees are thriving better than standard hives.

A woman in Petaluma, CA has the patent on these hives and is building/selling them. They are expensive compared to the standard square hive, but each HexHive is custom built and they are absolutely beautiful. (That is one of her hives pictured above)  You see her website HERE.

I have wanted to keep bees since filming The Bee Episode of Growing A Greener World and spending a few days with beekeeper extraordinaire Corky Luster of the Ballard Bee Co. Now…I want to do it in a HexHive.

There is an interesting study being done showcasing the advantages of such a hive. You can read about that HERE. In the meantime…a girl can dream…

UPDATE: This post prompted a discussion on Twitter about the hives. My twitter friend Backyard Wisdom found more info on the hives HERE and HERE and also told me there is a great downloadable book from Alabama Cooperative Extension on Bee Keeping. Yeah! 

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 A few months back, we filmed a bee episode for Growing a Greener World. I got to spend the day with an incredible bee keeper, Corky Luster of the Ballard Bee Company. I learned a lot from him during the filming. It made me even more determined to have my own bees one day.

Corky rents out his hives! He will place a hive in your backyard, maintain it for you and you get all the pollination from the bees and a jar of honey at the end of the season (made from your own backyard plants). How cool is that??

As part of the episode story, we followed Corky as he visited some of his hives. The first stop? My very good friend Robin Haglund’s garden. She is a popular garden coach and owner of Garden Mentors. She helps gardeners create and maintain their dream landscapes. She is so talented.

Here she is with Joe Lamp’l (The host and producer of GGW) She wanted a little extra help in the pollination department for her own backyard, so she had Corky install a few hives.

Wow. Those bees really were working hard.

And check out Robin’s cool greenhouse!

Here we are in Robin’s backyard filming Corky and Joe tasting the honey. YUM!

And during the shoot I got to see the rooftop garden at Bastille Restaurant in Seattle.

It’s made of raised beds with shade-cloth lids and the restaurant can grow vegetables there winter or summer!

It is a great operation and will be featured on the bee episode because Corky placed bee hives up there to help with pollination. The restaurant is then going to cook with the honey from their own hives.

The raised-bed garden was designed by Colin McCrate of Seattle Urban Farm Company.

(Photo: Left to right – Director Carl Pennington, Joe Lamp’l and Colin McCrate.)

McCrate, who has tons of farming experience, noticed that people wanted to have a garden in urban areas but didn’t necessarily want to tend it themselves.  So he stepped into the breach and became a garden designer who will come to your house, design a garden, and then maintain it throughout the year so you can have delicious food without hassle.  He can even start you up with a chicken house!  Costs can very depending on the size of the garden and the amount of upkeep, but at the end of it you’re eating from your own garden and your children are seeing where their food comes from, so it’s definitely worth it.

The bee episode already aired on Public Television, so we now have it up on our show website. Go HERE to watch the show in high definition.

After watching I bet you will want bees of your own too…

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