July 01, 2008

What's a bee hive look like?

When asked that question, what comes to mind? For me, it conjures up an image of Pooh Bear gazing up at an ovalish blob, hanging precariously off a tree branch, most certainly out of reach and with tons of bees swirling about. As nostalgic as that may be, it turns out those are wasp nests, and are definitely not where honey comes from.

How 'bout this, then? It's called a skep, and some beekeepers still use them. The problem with them is that they're not designed for harvesting the honey without destroying the hive.

The illustration to the right is of a Langstroth hive. It's the most widely used type in the US, and has been for the last 150 years. The Lang is made of up stacked boxes, each containing 8-10 frames which are removable so the beekeeper can inspect and harvest honey without destroying the hive. The frames are 4-sided, just like a picture frame. In the middle, where the canvas would go, there's a sheet of wax or plastic that is imprinted with the honeycomb pattern. The Lang beekeeper hopes to speed up production by saving the bee the trouble of making comb from scratch. And it works. The Lang produces more bees and honey faster than a Top Bar Hive. The bottom box or two (hive bodies) is where the bees live, and the top boxes (supers) are where surplus honey is stored. You start off with just hive bodies in the Spring, and when the colony reaches a certain size (is close to running out of room) you super them. You can keep adding supers to the stack as long as there's nectar flowing. A full deep super can weigh up to 90 lbs. and yields about 4 gallons of honey. That's a LOT of honey. Imagine how many 5-gallon buckets you'd need for a hive with supers stacked high! (Does your back hurt yet?)

A Top Bar Hive [Kenyan- or Tanzanian style*] works horizontally, so isn't supered in the same way. Instead, we'll be moving the false back to give the bees room. Toward the end of Summer, if they've built and filled all the way to the back, we'll harvest a single comb (maybe 6 lbs of honey) and give them a fresh top bar to work with. But only if the nectar is still flowing and they have time time to build a whole new comb, fill it, and ripen the honey before Winter hits.

Our bees seem to have slowed down construction significantly, so it's unlikely that there will be any honey harvested this year. As a matter of fact, we did a window inspection this weekend and decided not to super. The girls still have 6 blank bars to work on before reaching the false back. We'll super when they only have 2 bars left to work with.

*A Kenyan TBH has sloped sides, the angles varying by designer. A Tanzanian TBH is built using all 90-degree angles. Similar to a Langstroth but made with smaller dimensions and managed without frames, a Warré Hive is a vertical TBH system.