A Door for a Stingless Bee Hive — When "Makeshift" Needs a Redesign

I just helped Uyên Bee, a business that raises and supplies stingless bee colonies, solve one of their problems: the door of the hive.

What a stingless bee is

Ong dú, the stingless bee, has no sting. Next to other bees it is smaller and gentler, and it cannot hurt the keeper. Its honey is valued for medicinal and cosmetic uses, so it is kept widely in the south of Việt Nam, usually in small wooden boxes placed in a shaded garden where the honey is easy to collect.

The problem: lizards, and a makeshift fix

With no sting, the bee cannot defend itself against anything bigger, and lizards are the main one. They like to sit right at the hive mouth and pick the bees off. Keepers deal with it by pushing a short pipe into the mouth as an entrance tunnel, so the bees are harder to catch. When the bees have to be kept in, for a storm or while the garden is being sprayed, a scrap of mesh is tied over the end: the bees stay in, the air gets through.

It does not look good and it does not look professional. Sometimes it is a bottle, sometimes a bit of plastic pipe. Makeshift, and messy. So the business asked me to design a proper entrance: the same functions, colours that match. And since they supply colonies and the equipment to keep them, they wanted their brand on it, so what they sell is unmistakably theirs.

Designed on an iPad

When the request came in I was away from my computer, so I brainstormed and finished the idea on the iPad. For an accessory to an existing product, I usually model the main product first, here the wooden box, so the sizes and the position of the new part are easy to judge.

After one morning, this was the design: a main door, a cap, and a raised logo.

• The door has screw holes on both sides to fix it to the box.
• The cap screws onto the door by thread when the bees have to stay in. Its underside has vent holes, and once it is tightened the vents face down, out of the rain.
• The raised logo puts the business's brand right on the part.

The colours are white, yellow and brown, to sit with the colours of the hive.

Test print, then the batch

With the design done I printed a test, checked it worked, and sent the business the sample with the colour swatches to choose from. Once they said yes, I printed the batch.

Not the final version

It is not the final design. In use, two things need improving:

• The door is a little long, so it takes up space in transport and storage when there are many of them.
• The cap has nowhere to live when it is not in use, so it gets put down anywhere and gets lost.

I will keep improving it. And Uyên Bee has already asked for the next part: a roof for the hive, to keep off sun and rain, look better, and give their product one more selling point. The first test print of the roof is done.