One of my favorite flower-garden ornaments was a bee skep. Skeps were the first kind of container for honeybees to occupy and make honey. The only kinds of homes for the bees to now occupy are square ...

Made of coiled grass or straw sewn together with strips of briar, skeps are conical with at least one entrance hole and are placed open-end down. There is no internal structure for the bees so the ...

Predating today’s modern multiframe beehives was the skep, a handwoven, bell-shaped hive in which bees could build their honeycombs. In terms of apiary technology, the hard-to-manage skeps are ...