IKEA's research and design lab SPACE10 has teamed up with Bakken & Bæck and designer Tanita Klein to launch an open-source Bee Home. The offering is in response to the collaborative's recognition of the essentiality of bees for life on earth, which includes one third of all of the food we eat. The team's aim is to mitigate the impact humans have made on bees' natural habitats.

Bee Home is free and open-source, allowing users to customize, fabricate, and assemble a design of their making locally. "For almost 80 years, IKEA has enabled people to create a better everyday life at home," said Kaave Pour, Director at SPACE10 in a statement. "But our home is more than just four walls, our home is also the planet we live on. That is why we launch Bee Home: we want to enable people everywhere to help rebalance our relationship with the planet and ensure a sustainable home for all of us."

Constructing a Bee Home is a fairly simple process. One would first design their structure online, selecting from a number of parameters. Next, design files will become available for download that can then be forwarded to a local makerspace or fabricated at home if the user has the appropriate machinery. Lastly, the parts produced would be assembled, without the need of any fasteners, and placed in the desired location outside.

"To reconnect with the many bees in our environment, we need to give back what we have taken from them: their homes," said Myles Palmer, a Project Lead at Bakken & Bæck in a statement. "By designing new interactive experiences, we can create a more sustainable manufacturing process for doing so: one that is truly open-sourced, informed by local living and customizable for many contexts and uses."

Bee Home is designed for solitary bees, which the company writes make up 90 percent of all bee species, advocating for their friendliness and their strength in pollination. "I want people to design a dream home for bees that provides the perfect environment for their offspring, while at the same time being incredibly easy to design, assemble, and place," said Designer Tanita Klein in a statement.