How to Make an Eco-Floor for a Beehive
Channel: Phil Chandler: Barefoot Beekeeper
Date: 2015-05-03

Phil Chandler explains the thinking behind his 'eco-floor' design and demonstrates how to create both an eco-floor and an eco-roof to make the beehive more like a natural, hollow log environment for honeybees.

There are several aspects to the eco-floor hypothesis:

1. It could provide habitat for predatory and scavenger species (e.g. earwigs, Stratiolelaps), which are capable of eating any Varroa mites that fall to the floor.

2. It could provide a growing medium for fungi and other organisms that are commonly found sharing living space with bees in hollow trees and that may have symbiotic relationships with them, as yet scantily researched.

3. It provides a layer of permeable insulation beneath the colony, which helps to stabilize temperature and humidity within the hive.

The main difficulty that I have experienced is dessication of the floor material, probably due to excessive exposure to air of the lower surface. This year, I have a dozen hives ready with a MkII version, comprising 150mm guttering as the container, held under the hive using elastic tree ties. A few small holes along the length of the guttering allow for drainage, should excessive amounts of water accumulate.

My floor filling material is now mostly semi-composted wood chips, sourced locally and heaped on the ground for a few weeks before use. It should not need to be emptied out, only topped up occasionally.

The Japanese and Warre hives have a built-in advantage in that the eco-floor can be mounted in direct contact with the ground, which enables access by friendly species, but also mice. This could be averted by the addition of a mouse-proof mesh, of course. It may be possible to design a floor adaptation for the TBH to put the floor in contact with the ground: drainpipes 'plumbed into' the guttering and filled with wood chips perhaps...

Free top bar hive plans here - http://biobees.com
Warre hive plans here - https://tinyurl.com/warrehiveplans

Given that bees have been around for over 100 million years and honeybees at least half of that time, it is self-evident that they are more than capable of keeping themselves healthy in a natural world, full of flowering plants. 

Unfortunately, humans have ensured that most of the world is now far from natural and have destroyed, polluted and poisoned a great deal of it through ignorance and greed. This situation will have to change one way or the other: either we will push ecosystems beyond their breaking point and render the Earth uninhabitable, or we will see sense and fix the problems. Right now, the jury is out and the verdict could go either way. 

Honeybees - like all creatures - are fundamentally healthy: they can fend off a wide range of bacteria and only suffer from illness when something in their environment is out of balance. Usually, that will be the result of one or more factors beyond their control, such as:

- shortage of food, due to location, inclement weather, or being surrounded by grain-based, mono-crop agriculture
- polluted food, due to insecticides, herbicides or other man-made chemicals
- ingress of an exotic parasite and/or virus, imported by humans
- poor quality, artificially inseminated queens
- inability to control their hive environment, due to poor hive design
- gross interference in their lives by a beekeeper, opening hives too often or for too long
- noxious chemicals, such as antibiotics, miticides, etc. applied by beekeepers

All the above can be laid squarely at the door of Homo sapiens, the honeybees’ greatest enemy by far. 

None of this will come as any great surprise, but I make no apology for driving the point home with force. We have a toxic agricultural system, driven by the greed of trans-national corporations, some of which claim to be ‘bee-friendly’, but in fact are interested only in ever-growing profits. 
So bees are struggling with a number of simultaneous, man-made challenges. This means that as responsible beekeepers, we need to mitigate as many of them as possible, by any means at our disposal, to give them the best chance of maintaining their naturally healthy state. We can, for example:

- site hives away from intensively farmed land, especially where systemic insecticides are used
- provide shelter from the worst of the weather
- avoid using imported queens, or any produced by artificial insemination
- ensure that we use well-designed hives that make it easy for them to control their home environment
- reduce our interference in their lives to a minimum
- create the conditions in which bees can establish the symbiotic relationships they need with other flora and fauna for their full health
- use natural, indigenous, biological pest controls only when necessary, but no synthetic chemicals

If you read one of the ‘standard’ books on beekeeping, you may come away thinking that bees suffer from so many ailments and parasites that it is hardly worthwhile attempting to ‘keep’ them. To counter this, I can tell you that in more than a do