After seeing Hal’s log hive I decided I wanted to try one. Since a tree is about the most natural setting for a bee hive it should stand to reason that the bees would do best there. I liked Hal’s philosophy of not medicating the bees, not taking their honey, and letting them swarm as nature dictates.
I asked around if anyone could come up with a cedar log preferably hollow that I could use for a bee hive. Turns out that a volunteer at the blood drive was a firewood cutter “Wood Man Russ”. Russ Gunther supplied me with a good sized log for the project.
The log was good alright…good and solid, which meant I would have to hollow it out somehow. I looked for log hives on You-Tube and found Gaiabees. This was a beautiful log hive in a horizontal orientation. I found out how to start the process…cut the length to double the chainsaw length. That made sense. My electric chainsaw was 18″. So I made it 36″ long. I even used canola oil for the chainsaw lubricant to avoid hydrocarbons.
“DO NOT PLUNGE CUT”
was stated strongly in the chainsaw manual, but how else was I to accomplish the hollowing out process.
I carefully disobeyed the manual…4 times on each end. Making a square from both ends and soon realized the inside wasn’t going to just push out. First, the chainsaw wasn’t a true 18″, but only 16.5″ of effective cutting length That meant there was at least a 3″ wall in the middle beyond the length of each end.
I had to bring the sledge and bar routine into play.
After much heart pounding work I saw daylight.
Then I just had to saw clean out the shavings from time to time working the saw from one side to the other and rolling the log around.
To be continued…See video of the carving of Bee Beard
See also Randy and Loni save the day.
Adventures in Natural Beekeeping 
Hi Pat,
I know it’s been just a week since you posted your video but I’ve been wondering what you’ve decided to do with your beebeard.
I’m so looking forward to this coming Spring since my first package of bees will be arriving in April. So excited that I’ve decided to set the two Warre hives up on the stand outdoors and I even added a cottonball with a few drops of lemon grass oil in one to try to lure any swarms.
Good luck with your beekeeping venture.
Hi Yolanda,
Beebeard got a coating of raw linseed oil infused with bees wax (Phil Chandler’s recipe…biobees.com) to protect him from the elements. He will be set up early April and populated with (I hope) a swarm.
The experts at biobees suggested putting a coat of resin (what propolis are made out of) on the inside walls of a hive to encourage bees to stay put. And if you can’t harvest natural resin from trees around you, you could use shellac. The reasoning for this is only the prime swarms do the main coating of propolis in new hives. The others (packaged bees, nucs, cast swarms, etc) tend to look for old hives that have already been prepared instead of staying put in newly built hives.
I coated both my hives with shellac inside and I hope to populate one with a package in April and the other with a swarm ASAP.
Good luck.
Wow that was unusual. I just wrote an incredibly long comment but after I clicked submit my comment didn’t appear. Grrrr… well I’m not writing all that over again.
Anyhow, just wanted to say great blog!
Awesome post.