Hive Infrastructure

We know chickens live in a coop, rabbits live in a hutch, and flowers live in a bed...where do bees live?

Kind of depressing when I type this out, but...Bees live in a box.

Not a dark scary box where they don’t see sunlight. A box that has all sorts of shapes and structures that allows bees to thrive, work, and produce honey. With two weeks until we receive our 3 pound box of bees, so much of what I say here is based on research, but we need to know exactly what type of home these busy bees will be expecting when they arrive.

Bottom board

The base of the entire structure that the boxes sit on top of. It keeps the bee’s working space above the ground where it might be damp or muddy. Most bottom boards are made of a wooden frame with mesh in the middle that allows for any Varroa mites - a natural pest mite of the honey bee - to fall through; a white tray is placed below that allows for easy detection of mite presence by the beekeeper.

Brood box or hive body

A brood box is the first functional of the structure that serves a couple of purposes.

Honey storage: While the purpose of beekeeping is to use the honey for ourselves, we can’t take it all. Bees need this honey to survive the winters when there is no nectar available for their own food. The first thing bees do when they begin working is bulk up their winter stores, and only after this is accomplished can we expect them to provide us with any excess honey.

Brood: An equally important task for bees is to continue adding to their colony. They do this in the brood box by laying eggs daily (queen’s task) and tending to the growing larvae (workers’ task). They must work diligently to introduce new life to the colony since old bees are working themselves to death on a daily basis.

Entrance reducer

This narrow strip of wood is placed at the base of the brood box. It is meant to reduce the amount of intruders like mice or chipmunks, reduce the area that worker bees must patrol and secure when a colony is small, and provides more insulation during the cold months. They are easy to remove and replace as needed. They can be removed when hive activity is very high and many bees are attempting to enter and exit simultaneously.

Frames

Looks exactly like you would imagine a frame to look like: 4 long thin pieces of wood that form a square. This is the infrastructure that bees make their honeycomb on. The standard number of frames that fit in a box (brood box or super) is 10. They have long top edges that set on the frame of the box and suspend in air. When purchasing these, you can have them with built-in foundation, or you can choose to have foundation-less.

Foundation

This is placed within frames and is made of plastic, wax, or a combination. It is intended to serve as the structure that bees can build their honeycomb on. It takes less energy and time for bees to create comb on this foundation, which allows them to spend more time making honey (which honey harvesters and sellers love!). Honeycomb is made up of hexagonal cells, and so too is foundation. We have read that foundation cells tend to be a tad larger than what bees would make naturally, by a matter of millimeters. We’ve also read that larvae that develop in these cells can grow to become larger bees (bigger doesn’t always mean better), and Varroa mites tend to thrive in the slightly larger cells.

Queen excluder

A mesh screen that is placed between the brood box and the rest of the boxes. Worker bees are small enough to fit through the mesh while the queen remains within the brood box. The intention of this is to keep the queen laying eggs within the brood box and not allowing any to be placed in the supers, the boxes where we extract the honey from. While this restricts the queen from accessing the supers, she is still free to leave the box through the main entrance where all bees enter and exit. A queen excluder is optional.

Super

A super is one or several boxes stacked on top of the brood box, and all honey stored in here is used for harvesting. Structurally it is almost identical to the brood box, though it comes in different sizes: shallow and medium. A super most commonly contains 10 frames.

Feeder

Bees need to feed on a sugar source. In nature, they feed on nectar during warm months and honey during cold months. We can provide sugar water to help maintain a strong and healthy colony when their food source is scarce. We have learned from our local beekeeping association that an upside-down mason jar with puncture holes on the lid is one of the best ways to provide food - we’ll be able to determine this for ourselves soon enough. Other options include baggie feeders, candy boards, top hive feeders, division boards, or boardman feeders.

Inner and outer covers

The inner cover is a thin board of wood that allows for ventilation. The outer cover is thicker, has a wider lip that telescopes over the inner cover and top super, and has a metal roof. It helps protect the hive from the elements.