Giorgio Venturieri was guest speaker at the Brisbane Native Bee Keepers Club meeting for May 2018. Giorgio recently moved to Brisbane from Brazil and is very experienced with Native Bees and using them for pollination of local crops in Brazil. He described a major aspect of keeping Native Bees is that it makes people happy, bringing like minded people together to learn and share.

Giorgio now lives in Brisbane and is making and developing his own style of hive box. This is a square design using Hoop Pine 100mm x 33mm and is finished with a marine clear coat. These boxes have Acrylic plates between each frame, sometimes called Separator Plates, so when the frames are separated during a split the hive structure is held in place causing less disturbance to the structure. If when you open the hive and aren’t happy with where the “advancing front” is, you can simply put the box back together, wait and check in a week,

Above: Tim presented Giorgio with a bottle of wine in appreciation for the presentation to the club.

Above: Giorgio had a number of his boxes on display. Made from Hoop Pine 100mm x 33mm. Square Hive Boxes. These boxes will be for sale for around $150.

Above: There was a live hive on display for everyone to view.

Notice the entrance tube, this is the regular garden irrigation tube. Giorgio says having a long tube entrance increases the security for the colony. Any pests have to travel a long way through the tube to enter the hive and of course would be dealt with by bees before they got too far. The tube is placed on a slight incline in to the box to stop any water from flowing in to the colony.

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Below: This is a piece of Styrofoam box used to insulate a native bee hive in Sydney. These boxes usually create a gap with the Styrofoam and the timber hive box. The bees have secured the empty space by coating the surface with a thin layer of Propolis.