Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
This city beehive is situated so the entrance is away from the neighbor's house, which makes for happier
neighbors. The hive is also situated nicely on cinderblocks for a stable base. You can see the bees on the
entrance board buzzing in and out away from the neighbor's house. With the hive entrance slightly lower
than the back of the hive, rainwater cannot pool inside.
(Photo courtesy of Nicolás Boullosa)
The most important, and usually the most expensive, item you'll need to purchase are the hive
boxes themselves (called
supers
). The most common hive setup has boxes with no tops or bottoms
that hold individual frames within them. These frame boxes can be stacked on top of each other to
increase the size of the colony.
The most commonly available designs are 8-frame boxes or 10-frame boxes. We use 10-frame boxes
because that's what was available to us. We were given access to a set of old hives that had been in a
shed for probably 20 years. They needed a lot of work to clean them up, repair the frames, and add
new foundation comb, but we didn't have to spend as much money on the initial setup, which was
a huge boon. Obviously it's easier to start with new frames from a beekeeping supply company.
The hive boxes come in three sizes, a deep super or brood super, a medium honey super, and a
shallow honey super. The deep supers are used as the bottom box or bottom two boxes and are left
for the bees to raise brood, and store pollen and honey to feed themselves. The other supers are
used for the honey collection. If you use a queen excluder—a screen that has holes big enough for
worker bees to crawl through, but not big enough for the queen to crawl through—the queen will
only be able to stay on the bottom, and only the workers will be able to get to the top boxes where
the excess honey will be produced for you. If the queen cannot reach the top boxes, she can't lay
