The hottest summer on record is around the corner. Two things keep a hive alive in extreme heat: shade and water. Most Australian backyards have neither.

A suburban backyard last January — honeybees that left the hive looking for water and didn’t make it back.

On any 40-degree afternoon, a single honeybee colony burns through three litres of water — not to drink, but to cool the wax inside the hive. The bees that leave to find that water and don’t come back don’t come back at all. The brood overheats first. Within three days, the colony is gone.

This summer will be hotter.

The Bureau’s long-range outlook has the coming season running above average for both daytime and overnight temperatures across almost the entire continent, with a strong El Niño already locked in. Three of the last four summers have ranked among the hottest on record. The trajectory has not bent. Water storages in the eastern and southern states are sitting at or below 50 per cent, and plenty of towns are already on restrictions.

What that means for honeybees is harder to read in a headline. A colony uses up to three litres of water a day in extreme heat — not to drink, but to cool the hive. Water collectors carry it home drop by drop in their honey stomachs. Nurse bees fan it across the wax. The evaporation pulls the inside of the hive down to 35°C, the narrow band where the brood can survive. Without water, the brood goes first. Within three days, the colony collapses.

Since varroa was found at the Port of Newcastle in June 2022, at least 60 per cent of this country’s hives have gone across New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland and South Australia — a shortfall of 290,000 hives heading into the August almond pollination. The mite makes the news. The other cause, the one that rarely makes a press release, is older and simpler: heat without water.

Why most backyard water in Australia is useless to bees

By January most backyard birdbaths look like this. The bees keep turning up anyway.

A honeybee does not drink like a bird. She cannot land on open water. She has no buoyancy — her wings catch the surface tension, fold in, and she drowns. A backyard pool kills more bees in a hot January than any spray ever will. So does a birdbath with a smooth concrete rim. So does a dam, a fountain, a rainwater tank overflow.

What a bee needs is something almost no garden offers: a shallow water source, no more than 2 to 4 millimetres deep at the edge, with a rough surface she can grip with her feet. The water has to sit in partial shade so it doesn’t cook off by midday. The surface has to be visible from the air — bees navigate by colour and shape, not smell, and read a flat dish as an empty patch of ground.

This is the gap. Lavender doesn’t close it. A native garden doesn’t close it. A backyard with twenty plants in flower is still a death trap on a 40-degree day if there is no water on the right surface at the right depth.

And it is not only the honeybees. Australia has more than 1,700 native bee species, and over 99 per cent of them are solitary — no hive to retreat into, no colony fanning water across the comb. For a blue-banded bee or a resin bee, a shallow drink in the shade is the entire strategy. The research on stingless bees puts the critical limit at 43.1°C; one hour at 42 degrees kills roughly 95 per cent of the foragers outright. Those thresholds are already being crossed in eastern Australia in a normal heatwave.

The accident that started seventeen years of pottery

Bev at the wheel in the tin shed outside Nyngan, winter 2026.

Beverley “Bev” Hartigan has been throwing clay for seventeen winters in a tin shed on a block out past Nyngan, on the Bogan River plain in far-western New South Wales — red country, white-trunked gums, a galvanised rainwater tank against the wall. Her husband Col has kept bees on the back paddock for thirty-eight years. Forty hives at the peak.

The story of why her bowls work for bees isn’t a story she planned. It is the story of a January afternoon in 2019, in the hottest summer this country had measured up to then — 44 degrees three days running. The dam had pulled back. The stock trough was fouled. Col came up from the paddock with three dead water collectors on a folded piece of newspaper and set them on the workbench. “If I don’t get water out there by morning,” he said, “the rest go too.”

Bev was at the wheel that afternoon, throwing poppy bowls — the same shape she had been making for years, because it was pretty. Col walked past her, took one of the freshly glazed pieces off the shelf, filled it at the rainwater tank and set it on a brick beside the boxes.

Three minutes later, a forager landed on the rim.

I stood there ten minutes. Not because of the bee — because of how she landed. She didn’t come at it like a puddle. She came at it like a flower.

A forager at the rim of a Bee Blossom — the moment the design clicked.

Bev stopped throwing what looked good that afternoon. She started throwing what worked. The first generation was wrong — too deep, too smooth, the glaze too slick at the rim. The second was better. The third caught on. By the fifth winter she had stopped making anything else. Every summer the bowls sat out beside the boxes. Every summer she watched. Which bees came back. Which colours got landed on. Which depths held the water cool until evening. Which glazes held a foot.

What she has now, after seventeen years of correction, is a ceramic bowl that does one thing well: it lets a bee land, grip, drink and leave.

How the Bee Blossom works — and why nothing else does

The Bee Blossom on its garden stake: 12 mm at the centre, rough glaze, blossom profile.

• The Twelve-Millimetre RuleEach bowl is thrown to a calibrated depth of 12 millimetres at the centre and tapers to almost nothing at the rim. Filled to the lip, the outer ring sits at exactly 2–4 mm of water — the depth at which a bee can drink without risking her wings.
• The Rough GlazeThe outer rim is finished with a deliberately textured glaze, fired to retain micro-grip. A bee’s feet hold the surface the way they hold a petal — not the way they slip off a glazed birdbath or a concrete saucer.
• The Blossom ProfileThe bowl is shaped to read as a flower from the air. Bees navigate by colour and form, not scent at distance. A round, open, brightly coloured ceramic disc among the kangaroo paw is registered as “flower” before it is registered as anything else. The bee lands without hesitation.
• The Garden StakeEach bowl mounts onto a powder-coated steel stake that pushes into the soil between plants. The water sits in the partial shade of foliage, not on hot pavers in full sun. By one o’clock the water in an unshaded saucer is too warm for a bee to drink. The water in a Bee Blossom is still cool.
• The Mineral LayerBev recommends a pinch of garden soil in the water. Bees seek dissolved salts and trace minerals as much as the water itself — this is called puddling. A clean bowl brings the first bee. A bowl with soil keeps her coming back and brings the others.
• The Mosquito AnswerMozzie larvae need seven to ten days of undisturbed standing water before they hatch. Twelve millimetres in the open, topped up with the watering can of a morning, never gives them the week. The 20-centimetre concrete birdbath at the back fence does.

What changes in the garden by week three

Bev has been getting the same kind of message from buyers for years now. The wording varies. The timeline doesn’t.

Robyn W., a hobby gardener in Bendigo, set her four bowls out on a Friday in late October. By the following Wednesday she counted eleven honeybees at one of them, working in shifts. Two weeks later, a blue-banded bee. A month in, an orchard swallowtail came down to the edge to drink — uncommon for butterflies, which need their own puddling spots, but it happens at the Bee Blossom’s low rim.

Trevor H. has kept bees outside Mudgee for twenty-two years and ordered a set after losing two hives in the January heat two summers ago. He emailed Bev in March: “The other four carried through. First year in five I haven’t lost a colony to heat. The water is the only thing I changed.”

Steph M. put hers on a second-floor balcony in Fitzroy North — no garden, just pots. The first bee turned up on day nine. By week three, a dozen at a time.

Why the shed closes for nine months

Bev with one of this winter’s finished pieces — palm-sized, glazed by hand.

Bev doesn’t throw bowls on demand. She throws them one winter at a time, June through September, while the kiln runs almost continuously and the shed holds the only warm air on the block. The wheel turns ten hours a day in that window. What comes off the shelf in spring is everything she made that winter. There is no rolling production, no warehouse, no second batch.

This winter, between the arthritis and a wheel that turns slower than it did at fifty-four, she finished 186 bowls. By next winter she expects fewer than that. The winter after, maybe a hundred. After that, she doesn’t know. The arthritis decides. Seventeen years of centring clay have gone through the joints at the base of both thumbs, and centring is the one movement there is no way around — it is the press of the thumbs against the rising clay that wears the joint out. She can still glaze. She can still fire. She can’t centre.

My hands won’t make these the way they used to make them. A hundred and eighty-six a winter is what they can still do. After that, the number goes down.

Last year’s batch sold out in nine days. This year the heat is starting earlier, and by the time the first run of 40-degree days moves down the east coast the shelves will be bare. The next bowls ship spring 2027.

Col ran the numbers two winters ago on what each bowl actually costs to make — the clay, the glaze, the kiln electricity, the hours at the wheel, the pieces that crack in the firing. He showed her the figure. He told her she ought to charge at least that much. Bev put the paper face-down on the bench.

“That was never the point,” she said. “I don’t need these in a collector’s cabinet. I need them in gardens, on verandahs, on unit balconies. I need them where bees can find water this summer.”

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