Bees & Beekeeping: Present & Past

Beekeeping Experience with Other Hives

Working with different hive designs helps build versatility in one’s apicultural experience. Currently I am trying out different prototypes of long hives. A long hive has frames in a long horizontal row (see Figures 1 and 2).
Sometimes in my studies I need easy access to the cluster from above, particularly in the winter. In the cold, frame hives have supers piled over the clusters (unless the cluster is just under the cover, which is not consistent enough for me). In the active season when examining a long hive, having all the tops of the frames exposed is a problem because the entire colony becomes disturbed. To avoid that disturbance, I have removable plywood panels that expose only some of the top bars during a colony inspection, which is not an original idea (see Figure 3).
I use standard brood frames for these long hives, building them three or four feet long. That translates into very heavy hives. A 3-foot hive holds 26 deep frames, and a 4-foot hive holds 34 deep frames. I am incorporating these long hives into my top-bar hive apiaries by putting them on the elevated hive stands whose height matches the tailgate of the bee truck. In times of catastrophic weather events, and changing property owners, my axiomatic rule is that all hives must be rapidly mobile, moved by me working alone. I avoid lifting the hives. The hive motion, to load and unload the bee truck, is mostly a horizontal shift. That includes my frame hives, managed in all medium supers or deep supers for brood and medium supers for honey. I can move (slide) a fairly tall hive. If required, however, I just separate the hive and slide it as two smaller components.
I need more experience working with baby nucs for mating queens. Soon, planning for spring, I will start building up …

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