The Hive Architect: How One Carpenter’s Mission is Rebuilding Hope for Honeybees—and Humanity
By Sentel Wherever I go, bees come,” says carpenter and conservationist Matt Somerville as he brushes sawdust from his hands in a small woodshop lit by morning sun. For more than fourteen years, Somerville has built and installed over eight hundred handmade hives across the English countryside, each one carved from a fallen log and crafted to mimic the natural hollows bees have called home for millennia. His work, captured in the short film The Hive Architect , shows what happens when craftsmanship meets devotion to life itself. Somerville’s mission challenges a belief that has taken hold in modern beekeeping: that the British honeybee cannot survive without human domestication. To him, that idea is not only wrong—it is dangerous. Instead of trying to control nature, Somerville partners with it. Each winter, he works tirelessly in his woodshop, and when spring arrives, he loads his handcrafted hives onto a rigging contraption he designed himself, venturing into meadows to hang the...
