This Cute Wooden Shelter Is Like an Apartment Building for Bees
With a new bee home design meant for your backyard, Danish company Habeetats is creating a buzz around biodiversity.
With a new bee home design meant for your backyard, Danish company Habeetats is creating a buzz around biodiversity.
In his career, architect Jeppe Utzon has tackled a range of projects, designing everything from luxury homes and eco-resorts to social housing in Bolivia. His latest endeavor, however, is on an entirely different scale. Using scrap wood from flooring company Dinesen, Utzon has created the first bee home design for Habeetats, a Danish company committed to helping the solitary bee population thrive.
Habeetats’s Utzon bee home is crafted from Dinesen Douglas fir off-cuts and has been tried and tested in various research projects around the world. The boards are stacked and have grooves carved in them to create tunnels where nesting female solitary bees can lay eggs.
Habeetats
The Habeetats story begins a decade ago, when founder André Amtoft was working on food insecurity scenarios and learned about the importance of insect pollinators to our food supply. At the time, there was a lot of publicity around colony collapse disorder (CCD), a phenomena wherein honeybees die off, triggering a food shortage. People were only beginning to explore how bee species that were unaffected by CCD could be supported to ensure continued pollination and increase biodiversity.
Female solitary bees build nests inside the Habeetats dwellings using natural materials such as leaves and mud to create "cells" with enough pollen to support a single offspring. The bee lays an egg in a cell, and then seals the opening. When the offspring are ready to emerge as adults, they chew their way out.
Habeetats
When Amtoft’s sister, Anja Amtoft Wynns, embarked on a PhD project to study how solitary bees and their companion species, nest fungi, live, he had an idea.
"I had previously visited the headquarters of Dinesen, where I discovered many off-cuts in production," he recalls. "I reasoned that if we could design functional and aesthetic nests for scientific research, they could also be used for garden enthusiasts and agriculture."
Habeetats nests are crafted from off-cuts of Dinesen floorboards. "The collaboration with Habeetats ensures a meaningful purpose for our Dinesen Douglas off-cuts and ultimately a small contribution to maintaining biodiversity, nature, and taking care of our precious planet," says Eva Hjarup Preisler, communications manager at Dinesen.
Habeetats
See the full story on Dwell.com: This Cute Wooden Shelter Is Like an Apartment Building for Bees
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