Another Genius Using A Tee Pipe As His Hexagonal Tweeters

If you happened to have a BH closed to a populated areas at one side while at the opposite there are only jungles or no residential areas you might want to think about this special hexagonal tweeters.

I was in Sungai Patani recently doing some renovation works for another Blog reader.

During my inspection of his BH from the outside I was attracted to his neighbor roof top.

I saw a Tee pipe, white in color protruded on the monkey house area.

At first I though it was nothing more then a gimmick to lure those wild birds.

I walked nearer and I begin to realized that this BH owner is genious.  He block the sound from going to the back but focus the sound onto my client's BH.

Hmm this is going to be a big war.

It seem that he insert three round tweeters inside the Tee to allow the sound to be diverted only to three directions and not the back.

He also use the T to prevent his tweeters from those rain water.

A marvelous idea which I would like to share with my blog readers.

The Best Way To Cool Your BH

This was the exact word from a BH owner whose BH was recently renovated with proper roof and side walls protection.

He should have done that during the construction stage but that time he was trying to cut corners.

The relevant lesson here is that when you design a BH you need to make sure the internal room temperature will not crossed the 30*C level.

Make sure the top floor of your BH are protected from direct sunlight and those walls facing the sun are double walls.

To those who have not taken the necessary precautions you best bet is to regularly check your BH and in the event your temperature hit 30*C and above you need to determine where those heat are coming from.  Use those laser temperature gun to find them.

A few months ago I was helping a BH owner to revamp his BH.  I saw this simple gadget to cool those water used by the chicken coop humidifiers.

The unit was made of a big tub complete with the water inlet and outlet plus a pump to suck the water up to a pipe which spray the water back into the tub.  A fan was used to cool the water when it fall down.

The water temperature was about 25*C.

If you push this water to your humidifiers in your BH, can you imagine what will happened to your room temperature?

Yesterday I check the BH temperature and the result was about 27*C.  Prior to the installation it was about 30.5*C.

Simple but effective for those BH that face slight temperature variations.

Try Not To Use The Monkey House To Store Those Water Tank

The sole purpose of your monkey house in your BH is to attract those wild birds entering the house and no other purposes.

During one of my inspection visit, I was shown how a monkey house was used to store those water tank.

To store the water tank the owner put up a floor about 2/3 the size of the monkey house floor.  Only 1/3 was opened for those birds with lots of sharp corners to reach the entrance door into the nesting room. There were two partitions, floor up that simply block the flying path.

I think this should not be encouraged.

A monkey house with a floor and opened only 1/3 plus lots of walls and staircase area will defeat its actual purpose.

I would like to remind all my blog readers that it is not easy to lure these wild birds into your BH even with a proper opening, wide and total, of the monkey house floor.  If you should start blocking their flying path, I can say that you are not helping your self.

Try to locate the water tank to other part of the BH.  The best is at a corner on the top most floor of your BH nesting room.  You can erect a platform to provide the height for the water pressure.

Open the monkey house floor to the maximum and allow those precious birds to fly with ease to your nesting room.

Trust me that by blocking their flying path inside the monkey house you will face a huge problem in populating your BH.

No matter how many thousands of birds are out there, they will ignore your BH if you do not understand their needs and proper flying path into your house.

They might enter your BH just one time and once they discovered that the flying path is too tight, where they might hurt themselves, they will not enter your BH any more.

Treat this article as something that you can learn and make sure you do not make the same mistake.

Usefullness In Using Alluminium Plate As Nesting Platform

I was reading an article about the nesting platform in BHs.

The most common and reasonably  cheap in Malaysia will be those made of wood either Red Meranti or Jati. 

These planks must be free of any smell that are prohibitive to encourage those swiftlet from making their nests.

When wet they must not be easily grow fungus on them.

Over a prolong period of time they must not be easily rot and become soft due to high humidity inside the nesting room.

They must be also hard enough so that during harvesting they are easily chipped off causing these wood pieces to be embedded inside the nests this causing a drop in nest pricing.

One major problems with wood is that they tend to affect the nests color when they start to rot.

What if these platform be substituted with say aluminum plate?

To avoid the wood causing problems on your nests, about 1 mm thick and 5 inches wide.

First we need to cut some grooves on it and later sandwiched on the wood nesting planks.

The use of aluminium plates seems to be quite common in many parts of Indonesia.

Their main advantages are:

1) It can have a much longer life span as compared to normal wood.
2) It will not grow fungus even when it is partially or totally wet.
3) It has no smell to distract those young birds.
3)The surface is cooler as compared to wood and will condense those mist on it which is well like by swiftlet.
4) It will not turn the nests into other color except white.
5) You can make it wider in size this will increase the number of nests per foot run.
6) It can be used to cover those wood surface that are badly attack by fungus.
7) It is light weight and easy to install or remove.
8) The cost per foot run is cheaper then stainless steel.
9) You can actually move the plate once they have been used to a new BH.  This will help to quickly populate your new BH.
10)You can adjust the groove size or distance apart if you wanted to.
11) You can put different color on the plate to attract those swiftlet.  Fatick Marzuki recommend to paint these aluminium plate to either black or blue.  I recommend black, blue, green, pink and colorless.
12) You can also use these plates to test your aroma.  Take three to four plates and spray them with your newly found aroma.  Dry them up and install the plates onto your nesting planks.
13) Once the birds prefer to colonies onto these plates you will have more nest with 180* shape.  They might abandon the idea of building their nest at those 90* and 130* corners.


The only disadvantage, I am not very sure, is the effect of aluminium oxide that tends to build up on the surface of the plates when exposed to air. Normally any metal that are exposed to air will form a kind of oxide layer or skin to prevent any corrosion to the main metal.

So far there is not report of aluminium oxide poisoning.

I recently met a sale person handling aluminium materials.

I wanted to carry out some research on their effectiveness.  I have ordered about 60 pieces of plates 1mmX 125 mm X 2 feet with 5 grooves.

The Use Of Medium Size Piezo As Internal Sound Tweeters

This was something rare but I saw it being used by one BH owner and it works.

The owner uses medium size piezo tweeters as his internal sound tweeters.

As far as I know normally we recommend the use of small size tweeters either the 4"X4" square of the 2"X5" size. However this BH owner uses the 3"by 7" tweeters.

I was very taken back with his approach but then it works.

He placed the tweeter on the wall far away from the nesting planks (about 1.5 foot below). What happened was those birds build their nest on the cement wall about a few inches away. They seem to like the sound so much and prefer to be closed to the tweeter.

I was taken back and feel very surprised. Well as I always says that the more you know them the more you need to know about their mysterious behaviours.

I am sure I will make this as an option or goodies for any new BH. What the hack, if they like it then we just try.

My recommendation is to install a few at some strategic locations, not more then 4-6 of these medium size tweeters per floor (20'X70'). Play internal sound on them.

You have nothing to loose as long as your internal sound is perfect.

How To Attract Old Birds Into Your BH

What is so significant about the word "homing behaviour" in swiftlet farming dictionary (I hope there is one)?

This special word is to describe a very interesting behaviour of those matured birds that have already selected a place to build their nests to bring up their family.

The particular BH or cave selected will normally be their only home where they will live forever until they die or when the BH or cave is no longer suitable.

Which mean to say that old or matured birds will have very little tendencies in shifting their nest from the origanal BH to a new BH. This is embeded into their brain.

But is there any chance to lure them over to your new BH and how to do it?

If you wanted to take the challenge, you might want to do the followings:

1) Move those planks and fake nests from your old BH to your new BH.

This might be possible if you look at it logically.

Assuming you have a full house and you wanted some of these old matured birds to help in populating a new BH you build just a few meters away.

What you can do is to move some of those nesting planks across. Dismantle those planks with lots of markings or those full cup nests from your old BH across to your new unit.

Even if your new BH is much further then 5 meters, say 1 kilometer away, but you know pretty well that those birds always pass above the new BH land, you can do the same technique.

Beside those planks with markings and nests, you might want to also consider moving those fake nests (already used at least twice), corner covers (will lots of nest markings on them) and perhaps those tweeters (with marking or nest on them).

2) You need to play Baby Sound to attract them.

This is something that you have never thought before. Most of time you tend to attract those young birds into your BH. You totally neglect the possibilities in pulling those matured birds over.

It is well said that if your BH is located below a flight path, the best way to bring those young birds down will be the mating bird call sound.

However if your BH is located in a "Walet Sentral" area (located within a short distance to a very successful BH) you stand a very strong chance to pull those matured birds using those baby sound.

Baby sound refer to those sound made by baby birds asking to be fed by their parent.

Remember the chances to pull them over will not be as easy as those young birds. All in all they seem to have a very strong attachment with their nests especially those will a set of eggs to be incubated or babies to be fed.

The only time they have a laps of memory is immediately after they babies have just taken their maiden flight.

Be Careful When Using Any Humidity Control Equipment

We know by now that if you have problems with your BH humidity you can use many methods in raising them to the required level.

Normally you will require to shut as many ventilation holes as possible and install those water spraying equipments that suits your budget.

There are a few types that I have covered in my blog.

You have the mist spray system controlled by specialise timers or Hygrostats.

You might want to use those noisy chicken coop humidifiers that shot those water particles towards your ceiling.

You can have a kind of water dripping onto those walls and drain them out using gutters.

You can place water containers all over the room (Already banned in Perak due to possibility of breeding mosquitos).

The latest is to using soundless mist generating humidifiers.

All that I mentioned above are available and each of them do have their pros and cons.

One of the biggest issue will be the tendency of flooding the BH floor.

If you connect those water hoses wrongly or loosely there will be a big chances that the clip will get loose and the hose will be disconnected especially when the water pressure from the water source is way to high.

The best is to ensure that these clips are properly secured and the water pressure such that it will not burst the connection.

Those who uses the chicken coop and also the soundless humidifiers will face this type of problem.

To those who uses those water spray system there is also a strong chances that the timer you set are too much and with that your BH floor will be too wet.

This type of problem can be resolved if you make every effort to reset the timing lower then the initial setting.

I was at a BH in Gaya Industrial Park the other day. The moment we reached the staircase there were water flowing down. We know something is not right up there. The owner quickly reset the timer to reduce the time of spraying.

Using controller system (Hygrostat or HygroTemp), if you are not careful, can cause the same thing.

These tools are generally dependent on the air around their sensor. As long as these sensors sense that the air is not within the set ranges it will continue to allow electrical current to flow.

Just imagine if you do not shut those ventilation holes on the walls and your evening sun facing walls are generating high temperature all evening?

This will causes flooding if you are not careful.

Please take note on the above reminder and it they happen please do not blame those soulless equipment.

They are as good as how good you understand how to use them.

Special note: This article was written after receiving comment from Mr KK of Yong Peng. Thank you for your generous comment recently.

Thanks to your infor sharing...

I do felt that the soundless humidifiers has its hidden risk to the BH. I myself has experience on it.

1. the inlet piping valve can easily loose-off if water pressure is high-3 bar or more.( using water source direct from tangki somehow the water just cant automaticaly refilling)

2.If water pressure is low, the refilling process is slow and sometime cause the overflow valve malfunction... so water leakage cause flooding in BH.

3. the original power supply wire is not very long thus most of us would extend it to suit our BH nearest power point. pls make sure the reconection point is place above floor lever b'coz it is very dangerous when ur BH is flooding and current is yet to supply due to timmer still in off position.

Above is my experience while trying the soundless humidifier pls consider it as Things to check especially its concern to our safety.

Do Swiftlets Attack Other Colony Members

Many of us do not realised that swiftlet lives in colonies.

Each colony can be as little as 4-10 or as big as a few hundreds.

Each colony will have a leader and the leader will determine the colony's breeding behaviour and hunting areas.

If you observe the way the nests are being made in your BH there is a kind of grouping. Each colony member will prefer to build their nests closed to each other.

The nest grouping will be divided by some empty nesting areas.

You will be surprised to know that when those birds return home they do enter the entrance hole colony by colony.

These colonies will grow in numbers and eventually when they are big in numbers they do tend to be aggressive to the other fellows who are not from the same colony. If by then the nesting areas encroached into the smaller colonies group, the larger group will eventually takes over the territories.

This will normally happen if the width of the nesting planks are the same.

The only way to prevent those larger colonies not to attack the other group is to build a kind of colony dividers.

Colony divider is nothing more then a wider nesting plank, example your current plank width is 6 inches, a colony divider can consist of two planks that are made into one ie 12 inches.

Remember if you do nothing to prevent the harassment of the smaller colonies, they will either move away from the larger groups but there is a possibilities that they might move out of your BH and occupy your neighbor's BH.

When do you think you need to build these colony dividers?

Many house owners already have them installed.

Some, due to those cement beams, the dividers comes automatically.

Those who are in need to look into installing these colony dividers will be those whose BH are large and the ceiling areas are with not many ceiling beams.

You first count the numbers of colonies on the nesting planks. Normally the group will flocked closed to each other. The next colony will be on their own with empty nesting areas dividing them.

Once the colony reaches 25 nests each, the time is right to look into constructing those colony dividers.

Note: The two sketches are just examples. They are not necessary if your BH is new or with no signs of any colonies.