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Houston, We Have Scouts
Last Friday, we left the ECAT Bee Rocket sitting in the grounds of ECAT House with one fairly important thing missing. Bees.
If you’ve been following the story, you’ll know that this isn’t a conventional beehive.
Nobody was going to buy a colony and install it. The Round Tower Project is about providing the kind of natural nesting space that’s increasingly difficult for wild honey bees to find – and then leaving the decision to them.
The Bee Rocket was ready.
Now we needed to see whether anybody was interested.
A little help from lemongrass
There was one small addition, Lemongrass!
The scent of lemongrass is used to attract the attention of honey bees searching for somewhere to establish a new home. And then there was nothing more to do but wait. Until Lorna spotted something. There were bees around the Bee Rocket. Not hundreds. Not thousands. Just a few.
They’d found it.
We had scouts!
So, what exactly is a scout bee?
When a honey bee colony is preparing to swarm and find a new home, it doesn’t simply set off and hope for the best. Scout bees go house hunting.
They investigate potential nesting sites, assessing whether somewhere might make a suitable new home for the colony. And apparently, the ECAT Bee Rocket had made the property shortlist.
Lorna watched the scouts investigating the Round Tower. They would come and go, checking out the structure before disappearing again. There was no way of knowing what would happen next. These weren’t bees we’d brought to ECAT House. Nobody had put them inside the Round Tower. They had found it for themselves. Somewhere nearby, a colony was looking for a new home. And the Bee Rocket was being considered.
Location, location, location
This was exactly what we’d hoped might happen. OpenHive’s wider Round Tower Project is designed to provide nesting spaces that mimic the natural tree cavities honey bees would historically have used. One of the project’s measures of success is whether these empty Round Towers are naturally colonised by honey bees within three years. But providing a suitable home is one thing. Having a colony choose it is another. So we watched. The scouts had found the Bee Rocket.
Would they decide it was suitable?
Would they return to the colony?
Would other scouts agree with them?
And ultimately…
Would anybody actually move in?
For the moment, there was nothing more we could do. The decision belonged entirely to the bees. Then, not long afterwards, Lorna happened to be there when she realised something rather dramatic was happening. The scouts hadn’t just been browsing. They’d made their decision.
Coming next Friday: Part 4 – The Day the Bees Arrived
What happened next is something Lorna was lucky enough to capture on video. The colony arrived. Not a few bees this time. A swarm. And as Lorna stood filming thousands of bees arriving at their new home, she gradually realised something else. She was standing rather close to it. So she did the only sensible thing. She lay down in the grass and kept filming.
Next Friday, you’ll get to see exactly what she saw.
🐝 Did you know?
OpenHive isn’t expecting every Round Tower to attract residents straight away.
One of the project’s key measures is the percentage of hives naturally colonised by honey bees within three years.
So when scout bees arrived as soon as they did and started investigating the ECAT Bee Rocket, we don’t mind admitting that we found it rather exciting.