Copper Bee Apiary

Our house has a leaking roof. I bought the house over 10 years ago, and noticed the leak in the roof soon after. It still leaks today. Rain comes in. Every so often we attempt a repair. Then from time to time we get professional roofers in. No success yet.

Anyway, one day in early June 2015 I was sat thinking about how nice it would be to have a new roof. Perhaps we could redesign it. Perhaps we could have a vaulted glass roof, to let in light so that I could grow a grove of lemon trees in the sitting room. Or perhaps we could have a flat roof and I could put beehives on it. Or a green roof. Or...a copper roof. I very much like copper rooves. I like the metal copper. On the gin terrace, where the apiary began with the first hive - Cedar Hive - being set up, there is a copper rain chain hanging from the gutter to channel rain into a copper oxide glazed bowl beneath.

Imagine, a copper roof, with beehives on it. This was the germ of the idea for a name which, after some thought, became Copper Bee Apiary.

We don't have a copper roof on the house, and the old sloping tile one continues to leak. But I discovered that Thornes sell a copper roof for a beehive. To date, two of my hives have these: Copper Hive and Disc Hive. You can read about the individual hives here, including a photographic time-lapse of the oxidation of the Copper Hive roof.