Bee Shed

New Construction: 1995

This small and simple building, constructed of re-used waste timber and roofed with tiles, was built by the Open Air Museum in 1995 as an ideal-type representation of buildings of this type and size. It contains six to ten rear-access hives. Such freestanding sheds were common between 1870 and 1950 and would be set up depending on which type of honey the beekeepers wished to harvest, for example in the beekeepers’ gardens or along meadows, fields or forests. Thanks to the rising popularity of the Langstroth hive since the mid-1950s, freestanding bee sheds have become superfluous in beekeeping and are rarely used today.