martinatnewton - YOUR OWN BEE TENT

Make your own demonstration bee tent

If you invite people to view your bees, as part of a school visit or a beginners’ class, this might be a useful idea.

This tent is based on a cheap gazebo which has many other uses, such as a stall at a fete or a workspace at a craft demonstration, let alone as a garden shelter.

You will find a choice of gazebos at your garden centre if you don’t already own one. The gazebo is not altered and can still be used normally.

I would advise against the “folding” kind of gazebo. Buy the sort that has plain poles at the corners and edges. The complicated folders are great at first but break easily. Besides, they are more expensive!

The usual bee tent practice is to put the bees in the tent with the people looking in from all around, but this one is the other way round and was developed for showing small groups of schoolchildren the bees in my apiary. The children are inside the tent and the bees fly normally in their usual freedom. The children feel safer inside and can sit to watch and perhaps collect information for science work. None has yet been stung in the tent.

Preparation

Set up your gazebo on the lawn and measure the spaces where it lacks walls. The idea is to make flat curtains from cheap material to hang in these spaces, incorporating in one side at least a netting window. Buy suitable lengths of calico or similar cheap pale coloured material, also a length of some cheap curtain netting, preferably fairly even and not too dense a mesh in a dark colour, which is easier to see through than white. So long as the holes in the net are smaller than the gaps in a queen excluder, it will do fine.

Your shopping list is:

cloth enough for the walls
net enough for a full width window in one side.
thread enough to sew all the seams
brass eyelets for the attachments, the sort you put in position and hit with a hammer to fix them in the cloth. About 6 along each top edge, and 3 along the bottom for pegging down, total perhaps 40 for all 4 walls.
Velcro for attaching wall edges to uprights in the corners, maybe a metre in all, to be cut into short lengths and sewn on to the wall edges (top middle and bottom is all it needs) You could use more eyelets and string instead, but Velcro works very well.
Plenty of strong string. I use baler twine because I have miles of it.

My fabric shop has all the above except the string.

Construction

Cut and join your cloth to make the correct sizes to fit the wall spaces of your gazebo with a little extra in height and width so that the wall reaches the ground even though it be not flat and is a generous width rather than tight. If you leave a bit of slack you can ignore any slope in the corners and just sew square.

On your sewing machine, join and hem round all the rectangles of cloth, making suitable joins to get the net window at child viewing height, say 60cm from the ground and a short way from the full height so that the top of the wall is made of stronger cloth. Exact measurements are not important.

When you have put the brass eyelets in the top and bottom edges of the walls add about 30cm of string tied through each one.

The Velcro needs to be long enough to wrap right round the corner poles and overlap to grip, say 8cm minimum.

Action

Put up the gazebo so that it is close as possible to the beehives allowing working space for the beekeeper. It’s best if you have it backing onto bushes or trees so that people can arrive and leave under cover without the bees noticing them. The entrance is a corner away from the hive. Now hang your walls up by tying the string over the frame and the Velcro round the uprights, with the window, of course, closest to the bees. It’s best to put the bee window end up first! Put the gazebo up a day or even two before you need it and the bees will be fully accustomed to it and ignore it.

The observers approach from the back and enter a corner, closing it behind them. Any bees that are looking for trouble generally ignore the gazebo and even if they get inside they are only interested in escaping and find the gaps at the edges of the roof. I have yet to have anyone stung. Nonetheless, have some sting relief handy, even if only to reassure the doubters.

Although you generally open a hive from behind, it helps the demo if the bees' entrance faces the gazebo as children can then see clearly to do counts of flying bees to find out about their weather preferences or to see what proportion are carrying pollen as they return. This way round you are also facing the audience and not blocking their view of the hive contents.
My own set up has the bees behind a cheap fence panel that can be untied and removed when visitors come to see. The bees are used to flying up and over to get airborne and fly up and over the bee tent instead of finding an unexpected obstruction.

Originally I used an old frame tent with a net stretched on one side and this worked OK, but it was heavy, hot and not big enough for more than a few people.