Different Kinds of Beehives
A beehive, as any beekeeper knows, is a house for a bee colony. The interior of a beehive is a dense matrix of honeycombs — racks of hexagonal cells made of wax, usually on removable trays — that the bees use both to store honey and pollen (for their food) and to house their brood (eggs and then larvae). Wild bees make natural hives in rock cavities, hollow trees, and caves. These natural hives contain multiple honeycombs that the bees make themselves, parallel to each other in patterns that fit the available space. Honey bees prefer to make their hives well above the ground — from 1 to 5 meters — and will occupy a hive for several years. However, beekeepers provide manmade hives, acquiring a bee colony separately and then moving the colony into the hive. The most commonly used beehive today is the Langstroth hive, named after its inventor, the Reverend Lorenzo Langstroth. Langstroth, a native of Philadelphia, patented his design in 1860; today, 75 percent of beekeepers around the world use his hive. Langstroth discovered that if bees are given space of 1 centimeter in width to move around in — called “bee space” — bees will neither build honeycomb in that space nor cement it shut. Langstroth then used this discovery to develop a hive with removable frames. If the frames were spaced apart in a certain manner, the bees would build honeycombs into the frames without cementing the frames to the walls of the hive with propolis, a resinous mixture that honey bees collect from sap flows and use to seal their hives. Frames can thus be removed and replaced, not only to harvest honey and pollen but also to inspect the health of the hive and the queen. A Langstroth hive, therefore, is basically a box with a removable lid; the honeycomb frames can be accessed from the top, and can be removed and replaced easily. The boxes can be various sizes; in some, the queen is sequestered to a certain area of the hive, so that she is unable to lay eggs in honeycomb cells containing honey, and can only access cells meant to serve as brood cells. Another common beehive, found primarily in England, is the WBC hive, named after its inventor, William Broughton Carr. This is a double-walled box — basically, one hive box inside another. The double-walled design is meant to provide insulation for the bees, but critics point out that bees are perfectly capable of keeping themselves warm in the winter months. The honeycomb frames are inserted in the inner boxes. These days, WBC hives are considered more ornamental than practical; they are difficult to maintain and manage. A very simple beehive, originally developed for beekeepers in Kenya, is the Kenya Top Bar Hive, or KTBH. These hives do not contain frames, but have a lid consisting of slats of wood; bees then build their beeswax honeycombs from the top bars down, into the body of the hive. The top bars provide the only support for the honeycombs, and the top bars can be removed, providing access to the honey and pollen stored there. Almost any container can be used for the hive body itself, whether old crates, oil drums, even nonfunctioning refrigerators. There are many advantages to this design, and bees seem to adapt to KTBH hives readily. However, honey is generally harvestable a little at a time rather than all at once, so commercial beekeepers tend not to use these hives. A very traditional form of beehive, no longer in practical use by beekeepers, is the skep hive, made from a hollow log or clay pot or woven from reeds or vines. Skep hives, which are conical structures, resemble a coiled rope; the recurrently fashionable beehive hairdo is named for its resemblance to a skep hive. Bees seem to like these hives, but the only way to harvest the honey is to destroy the hive, usually killing the bees in the process. In these days of colony collapse disorder and other broad perils to bee populations, most beekeepers focus on preserving their hives, allowing successive generations of bees to keep their colonies going from season to season. Some country villagers in Europe still keep skep hives, but more for ornamental than commercial purposes. One of the most interesting types of hives is the observation hive. These are not real bee hives, but temporary viewing platforms; the walls are made of glass or plexiglass and the side walls are grooved, so you can remove one or two frames from a Langstroth hive, insert them in the observation hive (complete with bees), and take the hive to school for show-and-tell. These indoor hives can become semi-permanent homes for smaller colonies, as long as you provide access to the outdoors through a tube. They can be of almost any design — there are plenty of suggestions on the Internet — as long as you provide adequate “bee space” between components in the hive as well as good ventilation. There are literally hundreds of styles of beehives, adapted from local conditions around the world. Traditional materials include mud, hollowed-out logs, baked clay, straw, and dung; most of these hives, like skep hives, are “fixed-frame,” and the hives usually must be destroyed to harvest the honey. And the Langstroth hive is not the last word in beehive design; Dartington Long Deep hives can hold up to 17 frames and two colonies in a single construction. A 2009 design called a Beehaus is based on the Dartington hive and is intended primarily for urban beekeepers. Humans must continue to adapt beekeeping methods to suit changing conditions, and honey bees in turn will adapt to new surroundings.
