The Five Essential Hive Components

hive

hīv/

noun

• • 1. a beehive.

What do the bees need in a "beehive?"

So what does "a beehive" mean? Well, the hive has nothing to do with the structure the bees live inside of. In fact, honeybees need no structure at all. They can thrive with just their wax honeycomb exposed right out in the open hanging from a strong tree branch all wild, wavy and twisted naturally 100% drawn out by the bees with nothing provided except for something to build the comb down from. The colony itself doesn't need you to provide them anything. They know what to do. 

If somebody is fascinated by the honeybee and desires to respectfully keep and learn from them, observe their skilled craftsmanship and study their social behaviors the colony will need to be provided a sturdy managed hive structure. The ancient skep isn't a managed approach and its use is not in the best interests of the colony. To harvest from a skep the colony is destroyed in the process. Over the ages there have been lots of different managed hive concepts. The top bar hive, the Langstroth design, the Warre design to name just a few. We like Lorenzo L. Langstroth's design. He's the original guy who leveraged "Bee Space" to design a hive that bees could thrive in and at the same time facilitates manipulation by a beekeeper while not harming the colony.

We like the Langstroth design

So now that we've established that modern hive equipment is really for the ease of the beekeeper and the honeybees will work with whatever they're given we can hopefully realize there's no reason to quibble over which managed concept is better than all others. From a bees perspective any dark cavity is perfect. We picked the Langstroth design because it makes our honeybee farm compatible with the most widely used hive style by a long shot. The vast majority of other beekeepers use Langstroth hives around the world. 

But which Size Langstroth?

So if you're thinking, "Good enough for me. Okay where to I buy a Langstroth?" we have to hold on a sec and explain that they're are Large, Medium and Small depth options as well as the Eight Frame capacity and the Ten Frame capacity options to consider. I'm going to skip the reasons for all these options for now and tell you what we picked and why. Answer: Eight Frame Mediums is all we use. It just makes everything simple and like we've established the bees do not care. I'll leave you with this one fact: An Eight Frame Medium super full of honey weighs 45lbs. I should be able to work with those as an old man. The size popular with commercial operations is the Ten Frame Deep. A ten frame deep weighs in at 90lbs. That's one deep box of honey. 90lbs. Which is no sweat if you're using a fork lift. But the Eight Frame Mediums are very popular now with the majority of hobbyist/small scale beekeepers. That's what we are and who we cater to! We love Eight Frame Mediums! 

Foundationless Frames

Letting the bees draw out their own comb just plain works. How did those little honeybees ever get along all these millenniums with no beekeepers giving them commercially manufactured foundation? Well they handled it just fine. I hope you understand the bees never needed beekeepers to furnish them with honeycomb foundation. They still don't.

Now that we're past that, let's cut to the chase. Any Medium size frame can be made suitable for using in your colonies. But we live in a nice day and age where you can buy ones specially designed for beeks who prefer letting the bees build their own foundation on foundationless frames. Guess how many foundationless frames you can fit in an Eight Frame Medium box? Trick question. Answer: 9. 

As carefully made as the manufacturers are making the top bar profile in their foundationless frames these days, they still aren't making the perfect foundationless frame. They're still getting the end bars wrong. Typical end bar width is 1 3/8". They're just cranking out the same width the commercial foundation-using operations want. That's 1/4" too wide for us. Just buy the frames and use a planer to shave 1/16" off each side. Now you'll have the perfect foundationless frame with end bars only 1 1/4" wide. With the narrower frames you can fit an extra one in each box!  What did we just learn? Bees in nature build brood comb on 1 1/4" centers. In Natural Beekeeping the bees make the rules! So we use frames that let them do what they want. Congratulations, your Natural Beekeeping IQ just went up!

Cedar Shims

Buy a pack of Cedar shims for a few bucks at your local home improvement store. You'll find out what they're good for next. 

Concrete Blocks

  You're so determined to be a Natural Beekeeper that you've already found someone who will sell you a local feral swarm or a nuc from their local feral stock and you've picked out a spot on your property where you want to situate the hives. Now what? Just buy the "Five Essential Hive Components" and set them on the ground? Close, but no! Foundationless beekeepers know that bees draw out comb perfectly parallel to the pull of gravity. So if your hive isn't level your combs won't be perfectly vertical on the frame either. Your fault. Not the bees. They don't care. And it won't be a problem for the bees. It will just be a problem for you when you try to pull out a frame only to realize the base of the comb is attached to the adjacent frame. The bees drew it straight down like they always do; your hive was just crooked. 

  Buy four 2" X 8" X 16" concrete blocks for each colony. Drop 2 on the ground and make sure they are close enough that an Eight Frame Medium box sits squarely on top of them. They won't be level yet. Stack another block on top of each of these two blocks so you have two stacks of two. Now get out those Cedar shims and a level that can span the stacks. Work the shims however you have to so the stack is level front-to-front and side-to-side. Now you've got a perfect platform to set the hive equipment on! 

The Hive Boards

  Set a hive board on the blocks. That's your solid bottom board. Put an Eight Frame Medium box on top of that. Put nine 1 1/4" wide frames inside the box and stack as many of these frame filled boxes as your hive needs (probably just one or two to start with). On top of your top box set another Hive Board. Well there's no way for the bees to enter or leave now! Shims to the rescue! Slide a shim on either side of the top board edge propping open one side. Now you've got a top entrance! This is a perfect hive setup! The bees don't really need or want anything more.