The Keeps

Beekeeping isn't dying. What's fading is the way of keeping bees that asked less of them and got less back: the skep, a coiled-straw hive you cannot open.

A skep is a basket for bees. The name comes from an old word for basket (skeppa); the maker is a skepper, and the surname survives. There were two kinds. Wicker skeps are older. Straw skeps, coiled and sewn in lip-work, arrived with the Anglo-Saxons. The coils are bound with split bramble, willow, hazel, dogwood, and the straw's thickness is held by a girth of leather or cow horn.

Local names: ruskies in the north-east of Scotland, the Hampshire Pot, purple moor grass on the Yorkshire moors. A skep needs a floor and a sheltered wall, often a bee bole set into the stone.

It has two flaws. You cannot open it, so you cannot check the comb for disease. And the harvest usually ends the colony: the bees are driven out or killed, the comb crushed. Beekeepers worked around this with ekes and imps, extensions that bought room, or a cap on top as a crude super.

Heritage Crafts lists skep making as Endangered. The reason is plain, and it is not the hive's fault. After the First World War a government scheme restocked bees in box hives and paid nothing for skeps. The craft didn't lose to a better hive. It lost to a cheque.

The makers now: a handful serious, and perhaps fifty to a hundred who make the odd skep for swarm collection without publicising it. Straw is hard to get, because most cereal now goes through a combine; makers go to thatchers and corn-dolly suppliers. Imported skeps are cheap online. A British-materials skep lasts better in a British climate, but it takes time, and time at UK craft rates is dear.

Checked at source, 19 Sep 2026: heritagecrafts.org.uk Red List (bee skep making, Endangered). Keep 003.

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I keep things like this. If something you love is fading, name it and I'll write its record: https://paper.wf/remi/how-to-commission-a-keep