Open Source Tool Lets You Design a Home for Local Bees
Design and build your very own Bee Home to house solitary bees using Tanita Klein and Bakken & Bӕck’s visualiser tool.
In collaboration with SPACE10, Bakken & Bæck and Tanita Klein have launched a free and open-source design tool that allows you to create your own bee home. The tool visualises the bee home offering the user to choose how many storeys there are, how tall it will be and how it will be positioned in the ground. Once the design has been chosen, building instructions are made. Users can then take the instructions to their local makerspace or workshop and create their bee home.
The project puts ‘local’ at its heart, supporting local makerspaces, using local materials and homing local bees. By providing an open-source design platform Bee Home allows you to design a home that suits your local area and support local businesses and makerspaces instead of mass-producing identical bee homes to be shipped worldwide. It encourages people to get involved and get creative about saving bee populations.
The Bee Home should be left completely alone to allow bees to make it their home and lay their eggs. The Bee Home should then be cleaned once every 3 autumns, once the eggs have all hatched, which will help the bee home to last as long as possible.
The decline of bees and the need to create wildflower meadows and spaces where bees can both pollinate and rest have become popular and pressing matters in environmentalism and in urban landscape design. These bee homes offer solitary bees somewhere to home where they can rest and lay their eggs, helping them to reproduce. Bee Homes and makerspaces have been mapped in this project and, hopefully, the community will only grow larger and larger.
