Laurence Edwards found a mysterious wooden object at Thorn Beekeeping with glass panels, grooves, and clasps. He thinks it's a 50-60 year old observation hive for watching bees build comb, but isn't certain. He's asking viewers to identify it.
So I'm having the best day ever down at Thorn Beekeeping, and I've just come across something that I have never ever seen before. And normally, like, I'll find out what's going on and then maybe I'll tell people on YouTube about it, but no one here who I've spoken to yet knows what this is, and I'm a little bit stumped. Like, I looked at it originally and I thought definitely some sort of like observation hive or somewhere where you can like chuck a swarm in and watch them, but then it's not actually got a base underneath it. So in this video, I'm going to show you all of the details, and then I would like people in the comments to try and guess what it is. Because at the moment nobody knows, but there's a couple of people coming over later who hopefully will know exactly what it is. But at the moment, I really truly am stumped. So as you can see, it's made out of old plywood at the top and very, very old wood, cedar or pine, I'm not really sure. I did speak to someone though, and they said that this came from the original Thorn site. So this has got to be like 50, 60 years old, something like that, maybe even older. And these are the bits that are throwing me off here. So you've got these kind of glass screens in the middle, but then you've got this groove here. Like, what's that groove for there? And then if you look underneath, there's nothing there. There's like no piece there. So whether it's missing a piece underneath, and that's probably where I'm going with this, in that there's a bit underneath that's missing and it is genuinely an observation hive. And if you look on this side here as well, you've got like these clasps here so you can open up one side. So maybe what they did is they opened up one of those doors, they chucked in a swarm, they try to attract a swarm into it, put a base bit in the bottom, and then the bees start coming out through this slot here. I genuinely don't know what this is. So I've spoken to a couple of people here and they do seem to think that it is some form of observation hive, but they don't know whether it's complete or not or whether it's actually missing pieces. I'm kind of going down that line in that it is some sort of observation hive and there was a piece underneath at the bottom at some point But what a cool observation hive. I would love to have something like that. Something that's not like observing maybe like a frame of bees or a couple of frames of bees, but you're actually observing like completely wild honeycomb like you would've got in a skep. And you could just get like a huge monstrous swarm and chuck it in and then just watch them build like completely wild comb from all 4 sides whilst they've got real good protection from the top to make sure that they're not getting covered in rain. I think Thorns need to bring this one back. This is really, really cool. I would definitely have one of these in my garden and I think a number of people would have them their garden if this genuinely was for sale.
