The Gnome Mark III Stingless Bee Hive:

The Mark III Hive is (hopefully) an improvement on the UTOB and Mark II Hives, taking into account some interesting observations about the bees.  It is essentially a Mark II Hive with a few extras.

The current success rate in transferring brood comb into a new hive and establishing a colony is a mind-staggering 50%!  Obviously there is room for improvement.  So far, the lack of success has been due to a parasitic fly which I haven’t been able to photograph.  The fly enters through cracks and imperfections in the joining of the hive (because I am not a master carpenter) and if the hive does not have enough bees, they are unable to seal up said imperfections quickly enough to stop these flies.  The simple and easy solution (which I did not implement because I was lazy) is to seal all the cracks with beeswax (from other hives).  This is the first improvement in the Mark III hive.

The second improvement is based on noticing that a newly transferred hive does not need all the volume provided by both the brood chamber and the honey pot chamber.  The Mark III hive incorporates the feature of using blocks of wood within the honey chamber in such a way that only a small passage is left and the bees only have to “take care” of the brood chamber initially.  Three to six months later these pieces are removed from the honey chamber and the bees can start filling it up and expanding their stores.

Good luck with your bees!