The Bear and the Bees Woodcraft

Post 7 — Help Us Build It Here

The design is 150 years old. The engineering is done. The prototype is built and validated.
What we need now is a home base — a small piece of land and a workshop to begin production. That’s the $10,000 goal. Every dollar, every share, and every follow gets us closer to making the AZ hive available to American beekeepers for the first time.
If you believe the bees deserve better, we’d be grateful for your support.

gofundme.com/f/help-rebuild-the-bear-and-the-bees-woodcraft

Post 6 — Stands Behind No Other Bee Dwelling
Graphic: Winter apiary — snow-covered

Late February. You open the hive and find a dead cluster — not from starvation, but from cold. The colony had honey. They just couldn’t reach it.
Alberti wrote about this in 1906 with the directness of someone who had watched it happen many times. Then he described exactly why the AZ hive prevents it: thick insulated walls, a closed cabinet design, and a condensation channel that gives winter clusters what they need to survive.
His conclusion: “In terms of overwintering, the Blätterstock stands behind no other bee dwelling.” 120 years later, that holds.

Post 5b — Some Inventions Arrive in Parallel
Graphic: Queen excluder history

You almost certainly have one on your hive right now. The queen excluder — the flat zinc grid that keeps your queen in the brood box while workers move freely — is found on virtually every beehive in the world.
It came from concurrent discovery in the 1860s–70s: Abbé Collin in France, Hannemann in Brazil, and Adolf Alberti — who exhibited it at beekeeping conventions in Prague and Wiesbaden and helped bring it to industrial production. The man who gave us the queen excluder also gave us the AZ hive.
His other contribution is still waiting for its moment in America.

Post 4 — The Problem Before Alberti
Graphic: Hive history — Prokopovych and Berlepsch

Before Alberti, the best beekeepers in the world knew something was wrong with the standard hive — they just couldn’t fix it.
Petro Prokopovych pioneered the movable frame. Baron von Berlepsch, the most celebrated hive designer of his era, spent years trying to solve the access problem. Neither cracked it. Alberti did — and the hive he built changed beekeeping forever in Slovenia. North America is next.

Post 3 — Time is Money
Graphic: AZ hive rear-access efficiency
Adolf Alberti wrote it plainly in 1906: “Time is money — and the Blätterstock requires only about one-third the time of other box hives for most inspections.”
He wasn’t exaggerating. Open the rear door. Every frame is right there. Leaf through them like pages in a book, close the door, and you’re done — while the bees fly freely from the front, largely unbothered.
That’s the AZ hive. That’s what we’re building in Oregon.

Post 2 — A Problem 150 Years in the Making
Graphic: Hive history — frame access diagram

Every frame inspection in a standard hive starts the same way: remove the frames in front of the one you actually need (1860 Hinterbehandlungsbeute). One by one. The colony disturbed, the beekeeper exposed, the clock running.

The greatest hive designers of the 19th century recognized this as a serious flaw. None of them solved it — until a German schoolteacher named Adolf Alberti did, in 1873.

That solution has been waiting 150 years to reach American beekeepers. We’re fixing that.

Post 1 — The Name Has a Story
Graphic: AZ Founders — portraits of Alberti and Žnideršič
“AZ” isn’t a model number. It’s two names — and behind those names is a story most beekeepers have never heard.
The A stands for Adolf Alberti, a German schoolteacher who in 1873 solved a problem that had stumped the greatest hive designers of his era. The Z stands for Anton Žnideršič, the Slovenian beekeeper who refined that design into the hive used by 90% of Slovenia’s beekeepers to this day.
The Bear and the Bees Woodcraft is bringing both men’s life’s work to the Americas — for the first time.

Zavod Čebela - Medeno doživetje (Bee Institute - Honey experience). Came across this video from the Bee Institute in Slovenia and it was too cool not to share. As the title suggests, Honey Experience, it covers all aspects with the AZ Hive: apiculture, apitherapy, apitourism, api-education and even apiculinary arts.

There's no dialogue, the cinematography is outstanding and speaks for itself.

Zavod Čebela - Medeno doživetje Edinstveno doživetje v našem apiterapevtskem čebelnjaku