Beehive

For other uses, see Beehive (disambiguation).

Wooden hives in in Lithuania

Painted wooden beehives with active honey bees

A beehive is an enclosed structure in which some honey bee species of the subgenus Apis live and raise their young. Natural beehives (typically referred to simply as "nests") are naturally occurring structures occupied by honey bee colonies, whereas domesticated honey bees live in man-made beehives, often in an apiary. These man-made structures are typically referred to as "beehives". Several species of Apis live in hives, but only the western honey bee (Apis mellifera) and the eastern honey bee (Apis cerana) are domesticated by humans.

The beehive's internal structure is a densely packed matrix of hexagonal cells made of beeswax, called a honeycomb. The bees use the cells to store food (honey and pollen), and to house the "brood" (eggs, larvae, and pupae).

Artificial beehives serve two purposes: production of honey and pollination of nearby crops. Artificial hives are commonly transported so that bees can pollinate crops in other areas. A number of patents have been issued for beehive designs.

Natural hives

Natural beehive in the hollow of a tree

Honey bees in the subgenus Apis use caves, rock cavities and hollow trees as natural nesting sites. Members of other subgenera have exposed aerial combs. The nest are composed of multiple honeycombs, parallel to each other, with a relatively uniform bee space. The nest usually has a single entrance. Western honey bees prefer nest cavities approximately 45 litres in volume and avoid those smaller than 10 or larger than 100 litres. Western honey bees show several preferences in nest site properties: the height above ground is usually between 1 metre (3.3 ft) and 5 metres (16 ft), entrance positions tend to face downward, south-facing entrances are favored (as described by a reference from the Northern Hemisphere), and nest sites over 300 metres (980 ft) from the parent colony are preferred. Bees usually occupy the nests for several years.

The bees often smooth the bark surrounding the hive entrance, and the cavity walls are coated with a thin layer of hardened plant resin (propolis). Honeycombs are attached to the walls along the cavity tops and sides, but small passageways are left along the comb edges. The basic nest architecture for all honey bees is similar: honey is stored in the upper part of the comb; beneath it are rows of pollen-storage cells, worker-brood cells, and drone-brood cells, in that order. The peanut-shaped queen cells are normally built at the lower edge of the comb.

Ancient artificial hives

Bees were kept in man-made hives in Egypt in antiquity. The walls of the sun temple of Nyuserre Ini from the 5th Dynasty, dated earlier than 2422 BC, depict workers blowing smoke into hives as they remove honeycombs. Inscriptions detailing the production of honey are found on the tomb of Pabasa from the 26th Dynasty (circa 650 BC), and describe honey stored in jars, and cylindrical hives.

Archaeologist Amihai Mazar of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem cites 30 intact hives that were discovered in the ruins of the city of Rehov (2,000 residents in 900 B.C., Israelites and Canaanites). This is evidence that an advanced honey industry existed in the Holy Land, approximately 3,000 years ago. The beehives, made of straw and unbaked clay, were found in orderly rows, with a total of 100 hives, many broken. Ezra Marcus from the University of Haifa said the discovery provided a glimpse of ancient beekeeping seen in texts and ancient art from the Near East. An altar decorated with fertility figurines was found alongside the hives and may indicate religious practices associated with beekeeping. While beekeeping predates these ruins, this is the oldest apiary yet discovered.

Traditional artificial hives

Traditional beehives simply provided an enclosure for the bee colony. Because no internal structures were provided for the bees, the bees created their own honeycomb within the hives. The comb is often cross-attached and cannot be moved without destroying it. This is sometimes called a 'fixed-frame' hive to differentiate it from the modern 'movable-frame' hives. Harvest generally destroyed the hives, though there were some adaptations using extra top baskets which could then be removed when the bees filled them with honey. These were gradually supplanted with box hives of varying dimensions, with or without frames, and finally replaced by newer modern equipment.

Honey from traditional hives was typically extracted by pressing - crushing the wax honeycomb to squeeze out the honey. Due to this harvesting, traditional beehives typically provided more beeswax, but far less honey, than a modern hive.

Skeps and other fixed-frame hives are no longer in wide use (and are illegal in many countries) because the bees and the comb cannot be inspected for disease or parasites without destruction of the honeycomb and usually the colony.

There are three basic styles of traditional beehive; mud hives, clay/tile hives, skeps and bee gums.

Mud and clay hives

Bees in a baked clay jar in Malta

Mud hives are still used in Egypt. These are long cylinders made from a mixture of unbaked mud, straw, and dung.

Clay tiles were the customary homes of domesticated bees in the eastern end of the Mediterranean. Long cylinders of baked clay were used in ancient Egypt, the Middle East and to some extent in Greece, Italy and Malta. They sometimes were used singly, but more often stacked in rows to provide some shade, at least for those not on top. Keepers would smoke one end to drive the bees to the other end while they harvested honey.

Skeps

Traditional manufacture of skeps from straw in England

A bee skep at Dalgarven Mill. The base is part of an old cheese press

Skeps, which are baskets used open end down, have been used for about 2000 years. Initially they were made from wicker plastered with mud and dung but from the middle ages they were made of straw. In northern and western Europe, skeps were made of coils of grass or straw. In its simplest form, there is a single entrance at the bottom of the skep. Again, there is no internal structure provided for the bees and the colony must produce its own honeycomb which is attached to the inside of the skep.

Skeps have two disadvantages: beekeepers can not inspect the comb for diseases and pests and honey removal is not easy and often results in the destruction of the entire colony. To get or facillitate honey removal beekeepers either drove the bees out of the skep or by the use of a bottom extension called an eke or top extension called a cap sought to create comb with just honey in it. Quite often the bees were just killed, sometimes using lighted sulphur, to allow the honey comb to be removed. Skeps could also be squeezed in a vice to extract the honey. It is now illegal is some countries (including the USA) to keep bees in a skep because it is very hard to monitor and manage the bees.

Later skep designs included a smaller woven basket (cap) on top over a small hole in the main skep. This cap acted as a crude super, allowing the harvesting of some honey with less destruction of brood and bees. In England such an extension piece consisting of a ring of about 4 or 5 coils of straw placed below a straw beehive to give extra room for brood rearing was called an eke, imp or nadir. An eke was used to give just a bit of extra room, or to "eke" some more space, a nadir is a larger extension used when a full story was needed beneath.

A person who made such woven beehives was called a 'Skepper', a surname that still exists in western countries. In England the thickness of the coil of straw was controlled using a ring of leather or piece of cows horn called a 'girth' and the coils of straw could be sewn together using strips of briar. Likenesses of skeps can be found in paintings, carvings and old manuscripts. The skep is often used on signs as an indication of industry 'the busy bee').

In the late 1700s more complex skeps appeared which had wooden tops with holes in over which glass jars were placed. The comb was built in the glass jars which made it commercially attractive.

Bee gums

"Barć" in a museum in Białowieża

In the eastern United States, especially in the southeast, sections of hollow trees were used until the 20th century. These were called "gums" because they often were from red gum trees.

Sections of the hollow trees were set upright in "bee yards" or apiaries. Sometimes sticks or crossed sticks were placed under a board cover to give an attachment for the honeycomb. As with skeps, harvest of honey from these destroyed the colony. Often the human bee "robber" would sulphur the bees, killing them, before even opening their nest. This was done by inserting a metal container of burning sulphur into the gum.

Natural tree hollows and artificially hollowed tree trunks were widely used in the past also by bee-keepers in Central Europe. For example, in Poland such a beehive was called "barć" and it was protected in various ways from unfavourable weather conditions (rain, frost) and predators (woodpeckers, bears). Harvest of honey from these did not destroy the colony, as only a protective piece of wood was removed from the opening and smoke was used to deter the bees for a short time.

Modern artificial hives

Dadant-Blath beehives in Serbia

The earliest recognizably modern designs of beehives mainly arose in the nineteenth century, though they were perfected from intermediate stages of progress that had taken place in the eighteenth century.

Thus, intermediate stages in hive design were recorded for example by Thomas Wildman in 1768/1770, who described advances over the destructive old skep-based beekeeping so that the bees no longer had to be killed to harvest the honey. Wildman for example fixed a parallel array of wooden bars across the top of a straw hive or skep (with a separate straw top to be fixed on later) "so that there are in all seven bars of deal" [in a 10-inch-diameter (250 mm) hive] "to which the bees fix their combs". He also described using such hives in a multi-storey configuration, foreshadowing the modern use of supers: he described adding (at a proper time) successive straw hives below, and eventually removing the ones above when free of brood and filled with honey, so that the bees could be separately preserved at the harvest for a following season. Wildman also described a further development, using hives with "sliding frames" for the bees to build their comb, foreshadowing more modern uses of movable-comb hives. Wildman's book acknowledged the advances in knowledge of bees previously made by Swammerdam, Maraldi, and de Reaumur—he included a lengthy translation of Reaumur's account of the natural history of bees—and he also described the initiatives of others in designing hives for the preservation of bee-life when taking the harvest, citing in particular reports from Brittany dating from the 1750s, due to Comte de la Bourdonnaye.

In 1814, Petro Prokopovych, the founder of commercial beekeeping in the Ukraine, invented one of the very first beehive frames. However, for easy operations in beehives the spaces between elements need to be correct. The correct distance between combs was described in 1845 by Jan Dzierżon as 1½ inches from the center of one top bar to the center of the next one. In 1848 Dzierzon introduced grooves into the hive's side walls replacing the strips of wood for moving top bars. The grooves were 8 mm × 8 mm (0.31 in × 0.31 in), the spacing later termed bee space. The Langstroth hive was the first successful top-opened hive with movable frames. Langstroth hive was however direct descendant of Dzierzon's hive designs.

There are two basic types of modern or movable hive in common use, the "Langstroth hive" (including all the size variants) which has enclosed frames to hold the comb and the "top-bar hive", as the name implies, have only a top-bar to support the comb. These hives are typified by removable frames which allow the apiarist to inspect for diseases and parasites. Movable frames also allow a beekeeper to more easily split the hive to make new colonies.

Langstroth hives

Langstroth frame of honeycomb with honey in the upper left and pollen in most of the rest of the cells

Main article: Langstroth hive

Named for their inventor, Rev. Lorenzo Langstroth, Langstroth hives are not the only hives of this style, but they are the most common. Langstroth patented his design in 1860 originally being designed for comb honey production; it has become the standard style hive for 75% of the world's beekeepers. This class of hives includes other styles, which differ mainly in the size and number of frames used. These include Smith, Segeberger Beute (German), Frankenbeute (German), Normalmass (German), Langstroth hive, Modified Commercial and Modified Dadant, plus regional variations such as the British Modified National Hive.

Langstroth hives make use of bee space so that frames are neither glued together nor filled with burr comb–comb joining adjacent frames.

Langstroth hives use standardized sizes of hive bodies (rectangular boxes without tops or bottoms placed one on top of another) and internal frames to ensure that parts are interchangeable and that the frames will remain relatively easy to remove, inspect, and replace without killing the bees. Langstroth hive bodies are rectangular in shape and can be made from a variety of materials that can be stacked to expand the usable space for the bees. Inside the boxes, frames are hung in parallel. The minimum size of the hive is dependent on outside air temperature and potential food sources in the winter months. The colder the winter, the larger the hive and food stores need to be. In the regions with severe winter weather, a basketball-shaped cluster of bees typically survives in a "double-deep" box. In temperate and equatorial regions, a winter cluster will survive in a single box or in a nuc (short for nucleus colony).

Langstroth frames are thin rectangular structures made of wood or plastic and which have a wax or plastic foundation on which the bees draw out the comb. The frames hold the beeswax honeycomb formed by the bees. Ten frames side-to-side will fill the hive body and leave the right amount of bee space between each frame and between the end frames and the hive body.

Langstroth frames are often reinforced with wire, making it possible to extract honey in centrifuges to spin the honey out of the comb. As a result, the empty frames and comb can be returned to the beehive for use in the next season. Since it is estimated that bees require as much food to make one kilogram of beeswax as they do to make eight kilograms of honey, the ability to reuse comb can significantly increase honey production.

The modern Langstroth hive consists of the following parts:

• Hive Stand: the upper hive components rests on this providing a landing board for the bees and helping to protect the Bottom Board from rot and cold transfer.
• Bottom Board: this has an entrance for the bees to get into the hive.
• Brood Box: is the most bottom box of the hive and is where the queen bee lays her eggs.
• Honey Super: usually shorter than the brood box, but is upper-most box(s) where honey is stored.
• Frames & Foundation: wooden or plastic frames with wax or plastic sheets with honey comb impression where bees build wax honey combs.
• Inner Cover: provides separation from a overly hot or cold Outer Cover and can be used as a shelf for feeding or other purposes.
• Outer Cover: provides weather protection for the hive.

National hives

The National hive is the most widely used hive in the United Kingdom. It is a square hive, with rebates (grooves) that serve as hand grips. The frames are smaller than standard Langstroth and Commercial hives and have longer hand grips (or "lugs"). Many beekeepers now view the brood box of the National as too small for the laying activity of modern strains of queen bee, so many beekeepers operate the National with a brood box and one super. This is sometimes called "a brood and a half". While this provides enough room for the brood, it also increases the number of frames that have to be checked through regular inspection. Because of this the National hive brood boxes are also now available in a 14 x 12 inch size which gives a brood size similar to the Commercial or Langstroth.

Commercial hives

Commercial hives are exactly the same external dimensions as a National hive, but instead of having a rebate the hive is a simple cuboid. Because of this the frames are larger and have shorter handles or lugs. The brood box is picked up using small hand holds cut into the external wall of the hive. Supers have this same feature, which can make them difficult to hold when full of honey. Some beekeepers therefore use National supers on top of a Commercial brood box.

WBC hives

The WBC, invented by and named after William Broughton Carr, is a double-walled hive with an external housing that splays out towards the bottom of each frame covering a standard box shape hive inside. The WBC is in many respects the 'classic' hive as represented in pictures and paintings, but despite the extra level of insulation for the bees offered by its double-walled design many beekeepers avoid it due to the inconvenience of having to remove the external layer before the hive can be examined.

Dartington Long Deep hives

The Dartington Long Deep (DLD) hive takes 14 x 12 inch and can take up to 17 frames. It is possible to have 2 colonies in the brood box as there is an entrance at either end. It has half size honey supers which take 6 frames can be used which are lighter than full supers and are therefore easier to lift. The Dartington originally developed by Robin Dartington so that he could keep bees on his London rooftop.

Beehaus

Main article: Beehaus

The Beehaus is the most modern beehive having been launched in 2009. It is based on similar principles to a Dartington.

Top-bar hives

Main article: Top-bar hive

The top-bar or Kenya-hives were developed as a lower-cost alternative to the standard Langstroth hives and equipment. They are used by some devotees in the United States, but are much more popular, due to their simplicity and low cost, in developing countries. Top-bar hives also have movable frames and make use of the concept of bee space.

The top-bar hive is so named because the frames of the hive have only a top bar, not sides or a bottom bar. The beekeeper does not provide a foundation (or provides only a fractional foundation) for the bees to build from. The bees build the comb so it hangs down from the top bar. The hive body is often shaped as an inverted trapezoid in order to reduce the tendency of bees to attach the comb to the hive-body walls. Unlike the Langstroth design, a top-bar hive is generally expanded horizontally, not vertically. The top-bar design is a single, much longer box, with all the frames hanging in parallel.

Unlike the Langstroth hive, the honey cannot be extracted by centrifuging because a top-bar frame does not have reinforced foundation or a full frame. Because the bees have to rebuild the comb after each harvest, a top-bar hive yields more beeswax but less honey.

However, like the Langstroth hive, the bees can be induced to store the honey separately from the areas where they are raising the brood. Therefore, bees are less likely to be killed when harvesting from a top-bar hive than when harvesting from a skep or other traditional hive design.

Warré hives

The Warré hive was invented by Abbé Émil Warré, and is also called "ruche populaire" (fr) or "The People's Hive" (en), the Warré hive is a modular and storied design similar to a langstroth hive. The hive body is made of boxes stacked vertically, however it uses Top Bars for comb support instead of full frames. Popularity of this hive is growing among sustainable practice beekeepers. The Warre hive differs from other stacked hive systems in one fundamental aspect: when the bees need more space as the colony expands, the new box is "nadired". i.e. positioned underneath the existing box(es). This serves the purpose of warmth retention within the brood nest of the hive, considered vital to colony health.

Symbolism

A Straw Skep engraved on a gravestone

The beehive is a commonly used symbol dating at least to Roman times. In medieval heraldry it was considered a symbol of industry.

In modern times, it is used in Freemasonry. In masonic lectures is explained as symbol of industry and co-operation, and as cautioning against intellectual laziness, warning that "he that will so demean himself as not to be endeavoring to add to the common stock of knowledge and understanding, may be deemed a drone in the hive of nature, a useless member of society, and unworthy of our protection as Masons."

The beehive is also used with similar meaning by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or Mormons. From Mormon usage it has become one of the State symbols of Utah. (See deseret.)

In Wellington, New Zealand, the round building used for Parliamentary offices is known as the "Beehive". The official website of the New Zealand Government is www.beehive.govt.nz.

Beehive Brand matches made by Bryant and May popular in New Zealand have a logo based on the traditional skep beehive design.

Relocation

Smoke will cause the bees to move their hive. The whole process can take a day and requires constant smoke in sufficient volume that the bees feel the destruction of the hive by fire is imminent. Burning sugar makes a lot of smoke but could leave smoke damage if used indoors. Incense in large volume has been successfully used indoors. After the bees leave, the rest of the hive must be removed.

It is also possible to remove bees by installing a trap on the entrance to their hive which allows them to leave, but prevents them from re-entering.

Alternatively, in many areas, local beekeepers will usually be willing to collect bees to replenish or replace their own stock.

Destruction

Humans will at times determine that a beehive must be destroyed in the interest of public safety or in the interest of preventing the spread of bee diseases. Black bears will also destroy hives in their quest for honey. The U.S. state of Florida destroyed the hives of Africanized honey bees in 1999. The state of Arkansas has issued regulations governing the treatment of diseased beehives via burning followed by burial, fumigation using ethylene oxide or other approved gases, sterilization by treatment with lye, or by scorching.

Spraying the hive with a soap and water solution may be effective, since soap dissolves the bees' waxy exterior that protects them from drowning. The procedure is, however, surrounded with cautions.

See also

• Apidictor
• Bee bole

External links

• DIY Top Bar Hive Design: The Honey Cow
• American Beekeeping History -- The Bee Hive at John's Beekeeping Notebook
• Top Bar Hive Beekeeping at John's Beekeeping Notebook
• Beehives -- Woodworking plans. BeeSource.Com, 2004.
• instructions and photos for hot wax dipping of beehives components