A tour of the type of hive I use

I use all 5 frame hive boxes.  I will let the stack get up to 5 boxes high.  I use the Warre method predominately to manage the hives I run.

This is one of my hives in action.  You might notice the hanging water pail in the background.  This is how all my hives begin the Spring, a two box stack with a quilt box and an simple lid.

You can see ( I hope) the bottom board has 3/8" risers giving them a 3/8"x 7.5" entrance.  Very easy to defend, even for a small colony.

Next is a more up-close photo of a box.

We see here that it is a 5 frame nuc box using deep frames.  Notice that the end board is sandwiched between the side boards as I mentioned in one of the last articles.

This next picture shows the type of simple top I make for these hives.

Just a board cut to the dimensions of a box with blocks added on each side to keep it from easily coming off in the wind.

Next up is the quilt box.

The quilt box is largely in place for ventilation and absorbing excess humidity from the hive.  As the heat and moist air rises in the hive, it passes up into the quilt box which is normally filled with wood shavings keeping the hive itself drier and allows the bees to have some bit of control of the ventilation in the hive as they close the holes with propolis or remove propolis.


Inside the boxes are five deep frames.  The center is what I refer to as the "key" comb and has a sheet of foundation in it hopefully giving the bees a guide to draw the other, foundation-less, frames by.

This is a sheet of black plastic foundation as the "Key" comb in frame position 3.


Also in the boxes are 4 foundation-less frames.  These are in frame positions 1, 2, 4 and 5.

Notice the comb guides placed in the underside of the top bar.  This is the strip of wood that is normally in place there on frames that are referred to as "wedge" top.  The guide is most exposed on the side of the top bar where the wedge used to be.

I have made what I consider to be an important observation about the placement of these frames in that the exposed guides should be placed facing the center "Key" comb.  The bees seem to draw the new comb straighter than if the "wedge" side of the frame faces the center.

That's pretty much it.  It's a simple hive.  The inner dimensions are very similar in size to a "typical" void that bees choose in a tree in terms of total size as well as volume.  This is an important consideration in the Warre approach to bee hives as he believed, and I agree, that bees need a space that is more easily maintained by them without being too confining or to spacious to properly maintain.

Boxes are added by "nadiring" them instead of "supering" them.  That means adding boxes to the bottom of the stack instead of the top.  This is to emulate the "natural" process of bees building a nest in a tree void in which they start drawing comb from the top of the void and as they draw and expand the comb downward, the broodnest is moved downward as well into the newer comb while the older comb above is back-filled with honey stores.

Another benefit the Warre method sees in "nadiring" is that by adding additional boxes to the bottom of the stack, the hive top is removed less often thus retaining natural nest heat and nest scent.  This in turn seems to not disrupt the bees behavior and upsets them less than removing the top to add boxes and losing the heat and scent so important in honey bee society.

All the boxes need to be added by the end of Spring for the most part so that they can draw the combs out on each frame while the weather and available resources allow for them to draw comb freely.  After roughly the end of June, the weather is hotter and forage resources tend to become more sparse causing the bees to tend to abandon drawing new comb in favor of storing that precious nectar for honey stores instead.  I find myself with usually about 5 boxes in the stack by the end of comb drawing time.

At harvest time, roughly the end of July or even August, depending on weather and available resources, a five frame stack such as I mentioned will yield 3 boxes of honey from the top of the stack.  The two remaining boxes are left to the bees to overwinter in as they backfill the upper box for their winter stores.  That's the idea anyway.

Having 3 boxes gives a yield, on average, of about 35 to 45 pounds of honey per box with a total average yield of about 120 pounds per hive in good years.

I hope this gives folks a better idea of how I go about my beekeeping.

Enjoy your bees.