MATT SOMERVILLE
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THE BEE WATCHER
Words - Jo Somerville Photos - Zoe Salt
Its louder than you ever thought it would be. Buzzing, vibrating. In moments, the pure sky darkens with a fizzing cloud of bees.
You have been waiting for hours. With your neighbours, you hammered the natural beehive into a meadow. It was early morning then and before-dawn blue. Now in the midday heat, the hive smells of lemongrass oil and honeycomb. The scents attract the swarm.
You know this swarm. It is an offshoot of the wild colony still living in a hollowed beech tree in the local woodland. Not long ago, anyone could have legally destroyed the hive by cutting down the tree or poisoning the colony with insecticide. Back then, most bees were cultivated -- placed low to the ground in boxes with thin walls. In those artificial hives, bees couldn’t survive long without help.
But now the culture has changed. Wild bee nests are respected and legally protected. After years of targeted bee education in schools and at community events, everyone knows that more bees mean thriving gardens and crops. Anti-pesticide laws have resulted in sweet wildflowers blooming in every verge, and insects of all kinds, especially bees, have thrived in the profusion.
The swarm gathers its humming darkness directly above the crowd then pours into the new hive. The suspense is broken, and the crowd cheers. For several years now, celebrations like this have been common across the country as communities build hives. Bees are no longer owned by individual beekeepers. Instead, they are supported in living as they would in the wild.
A few days after the swarm’s arrival, you find a quieter moment to return to the hive. Newly hatched bees bob in the air, orientating themselves in daylight for the first time. They are darker and wilder than the bred bees of the past. Worker bees enter and leave the hive with rhythmic precision, bright orange dandelion pollen coating their legs. Watching them dance, listening to the humming of their wings fanning against the hive’s entrance, you feel now, a deep sense of connectedness.
“People ring me up with tears of happiness when the bees come to our hives,” said Matt Somerville, founder of BeeKindHives.
Matt began BeeKindHives because he knew someone needed to act. One spring, his apple orchard fell silent. Every year he visited the orchard to listen to the bees visiting blossoms, but this year, he found nothing. With one third of British wild bees and hoverflies in decline, Matt decided to become Beekeeper.
Unfortunately, this wasn’t the solution he had hoped it would be. In beekeeping, he learned a surprising fact: there are already too many bees in the landscape, but they’re often in densely concentrated spaces. Bee overpopulation can create disease and threaten the health of nearby wild bee colonies. In a traditional beekeeping hive, bees are also prevented from building their own comb, breeding naturally, and swarming to move home. Beekeepers take so much honey that bees can’t survive through winter without being fed artificial sugar.
Even with these problems, there didn’t seem to be a feasible alternative. “When I started beekeeping, I was told bees couldn’t survive in the wild without human support,” Matt explained. But one day, a surprising thing happened. Matt’s bees swarmed from his traditional hive into a wild cavity of a nearby beech tree.
From this, he learned that honeybees were living and thriving in the wild without human intervention. This moment turned Matt into a wild bee advocate and entrepreneur. Now, instead of Beekeeper, he calls himself a Beewatcher. “I started thinking let’s try and create cavities that the bees want in the wild.” From there he designed Rocket Hives. Made from a hollowed-out tree trunk placed on wooden legs, the hive resembles natural tree hollows. These hives are placed above head height so people can watch the bees fly without fear of disturbing them or getting stung. Rocket Hives have natural insulation, and rarely require intervention. If people do take honey from them, they remove much less.
Too often wild bees are exterminated and seen as pests. Matt is changing things. “Wild bees are our saviours to greater biodiversity”.
How to start your wild beewatching journey:
Read more about Matt Somerville’s by following @_beekindhives_ or by visiting his website here. Learn about Natural Beekeeping here. Take action by allowing some of your mowed lawn grow longer and by sowing these wildflowers. Support and agitate for anti-pesticide action, wild bee protections, and bee education. Finally, you can read more in these books: ‘Honey Bees’ and ‘The Buzz about Bees’ by Inigo Arndt and Jurgen Taütz. Also, read Thomas Seeley’s ‘The Lives of Bees’ or ‘Honeybee Democracy’.