I Fixed The Langstroth Hive (For The Bees AND The Keeper!)

hi my name is jim and i have to admit that i have a huge problem with the langstroth beehive if you watch my videos in the past you know for years now i've been modifying these boxes changing things adding things insulation coroplast vivaldi boards trying to get this hive to be a suitable home for my bees through the winter and frankly it's become a big pain in the ass so this year i decided to do a complete redesign of the langstroth hive system and this is what i came up with this is the new bee barn and it doesn't just look cool on the outside wait to see what's on the inside so the number one problem i have with the langstroth beehive is what it's made of this is your standard langstroth box available online you know beekeeping supply stores this is standard the world over for langstroth beehives three quarters of an inch thick pine wood very soft wood horrible in the weather almost no insulating value and because i live in massachusetts and we have six month winters that are very cold this is what i resort to to get my bees through the winter [Music] so not everyone is going to need all this stuff to get their bees through the winter you may only have some tar paper or a vivaldi board or a little insulation in your lids but either way dealing with all this stuff to help the bees get through a cold winter deal with moisture deal with wind it's always a problem because we're starting off with a thin wooden box so this is main problem number one problem number two all right let's talk about hive configuration and the frame situation so this is your standard langstroth layout for say a summer time you got your super on top and a deep on the bottom that's the brood box down there i like to keep in eight frame deeps so i got eight deep langstroth frames down here queen is down here laying away all summer long she's filling this up with brood i put the excluder on to keep her down here and then i super on top that's standard in the fall i like to let my bees go through winter with a deep and a medium together as their winter configuration so i take the excluder off and all fall along i'm feeding syrup heavily to get them to fill this all up with stores now before the winter happens i pre-rotate the boxes so i take this off take this off put the medium down below this is filled with syrup and filled with nectar put this on top they go through winter this way that way they can eat through all their stores and then when the spring comes and and the top of the box is a little warmer than the bottom of the box the queen starts laying up here in this box which is where i want her to lay because this is her deep this is her brood box so queen's laying away up here in the springtime and then right around late may when things really warm up i flip everything back take that off give her an excluder put the lid on as soon as they're ready and this is all filled up with brood again take this off add my super and then we're off and running for the summer now these boxes are empty but when they're full of syrup this weighs about 80 pounds and this weighs about 50 pounds and when you have a dozen hives that's a huge pain in the back so i've been toying with the idea of giving the bees a deep medium brood box combination for the entire year so it would look like this you got your deep langstroth your medium langstroth queen excluder up here and this whole cavity would be open for her to lay in when i started out beekeeping everyone told me you need a double deep to get through the winter so i was giving the queens uh double deep brood boxes this is a medium here but my bees only have a four month summertime and i never had bees that would fill two whole boxes they would lay the top and the bottom would be kind of sparsely laid and there's a lot of empty frames down here come the fall i found the deep and medium to be sort of the goldilocks you know configuration so if i gave them this for the entire year it would be convenient so i wouldn't have to do that flip in the fall however in the summer i'm still lifting boxes every time i have to inspect so if i'm looking for a queen for some reason i gotta take the boxes off i'm i'm you know exposing bees down here you know i gotta go through 16 frames there's just so many frames not to mention this right here this break in the boxes i don't like that i don't like that the queens are happily running around laying up here but there's a physical gap between the frames there's all this space here that the queens have to travel across to go down here to lay and i think that that's a barrier that they're not going to go down here as much and lay down here even if they have the option because this is just fine up here why go all the way down below let me show you what i mean all right there's a standard langstroth deep frame looks something like this generally when the queen's laying brewed in a langstroth frame the brood is something like this there's sort of this sir half circle shape so we got brood and that is surrounded by pollen and resources right tight up against the brood usually so we have the pollen which feeds the brood up there and that whole deal is surrounded by honey all in here is honey so you have concentric circles around the brood in the middle of the box now this is a langstroth frame on the face if you turn that 90 degrees and look this direction this shape continues in the box looking this way so your brood is usually concentrated toward the middle of the hive like this then you have pollen and resources around that and then your honey is always on the outsides around the bottom and that is kind of how the bees set things up so i've been looking at this shape a lot and wondering what would happen if the bees had more space i think if the bees could build a nest floating in space where there wasn't a constriction of a box or frames or anything they would prefer to build a giant sphere put their brood in the middle of that sphere that was protected surround that sphere with pollen and resources like this and then fill the rest with honey as an insulating layer all the way around that brood so it's sort of ideally a giant nest that was a big round ball so i think this is what the bees would build if they could build in space but what we do is we put them in a langstroth frame in a langstroth box and this is the shape that comes out and i think that's because they're they're confined to that space and if you give them another brood box they don't necessarily continue the pattern like this they repeat this pattern and they put the brood up here and the honey and it's because there's a gap and i wanted to see what would happen if you gave the bees continuous space with no breaks so i do like the deep medium box combination as as a as a cavity i like i like the volume of it for the bees to fill up to overwinter but what i dislike is that all the frames there's 16 frames here inspections are a pain you got the flipping and the rotating in the spring in the fall and then there's this gap in the middle for the the queen you know to cross over when she's making that nest and i wanted to solve that so what i did is built a frame that goes all the way down to the bottom of the hive so these are my new extra deep langstroth frames and they do hang all the way down and they fill up this entire space this is your standard langstroth deep as you can see there fills that space and that's what i built now i have seen people with horizontal hives do that extra deep horizontal hive thing where they take two deep frames and just screw them together and they make this massive frame like this which is a similar kind of idea except you're still left with this bar in the middle that the queen has to cross over it's not continuous comb and it's just not very pretty or elegant and i didn't really like that as much and this frame is way too big to have foundationless i mean it's gigantic it would be ridiculous for this to be foundationless so to solve that i added medium and deep foundation to the frame so that's your standard deep foundation standard medium foundation and there is a hole in the middle but that gap is for the bees to fill this hole here is like b's choice they can do whatever they want with that they can make worker cells that go across the gap they can leave it open for communication and pass through or they can put drone comb there or they could put queen cells right here it's a great space to put queen cells as well but i wanted to give the bees the choice and if they do decide to just make continuous worker calm all the way down this is an entire palette for the queen to lay into and i'm really curious to see how they use this so these are my new frames for my new hives all right i don't even know what i'm going to call this yet my working name has been calling it the b barn but anyway let me give you a full tour first thing you'll notice is there's no cinder block holding the top on no more cinder blocks new two inch ratchet straps without ratchets newly designed coroplast cover standard langstroth lid new vent feeding winter wick box i'll get into that later new high tech inner cover which i'll get into later [Music] and let's take a look inside all right i just had to run indoors because it started pouring rain out and i got to finish this video tonight because my bees are coming in the morning so as you can see here we got gigantic thick walls surrounding langstroth boxes so this is a deep medium cavity i put the deep and the medium together and i taped them together with zip tape and then i surrounded the deep medium box with two inch polystyrene so that goes around four sides all the way around the whole hive i then took two by six alaskan yellow cedar and put that around the foam so we got a weather resistant exterior to the hive this is really good uh in in the weather it's very very rot resistant insect resistant and uh we're not gonna have a lot of problems with with the yellow cedar on the outside the foam is the the r value insulation and then we got the standard langstroth box that the bees know and love it's filled with propolis and smells like bees so they're going to be fine with the inside of the hive you'll see that i do have screen bottom boards and i do like screen bottom boards for mic drop and for all the garbage that falls out of the you know the hive it's easier to clean out because it's screened i have standard coroplast down there to catch garbage and mites that falls out of the hive below this built into my stands i've got more two inch polystyrene that is press fit up into the stands but below the mite board is more foam so there this is not a screen that's open to the elements this is closed off but when i really want to i can take the foam i can pop the foam out clean the hive and i can count mites and do all the safe stuff so i have the flexibility of having the screen when i want it but the screen is insulated below so there's not drafts coming up into the hive so we got a really nice big cavity for the bees to fill up for the brood box it's fully insulated it's weather protected weather sealed you'll see my lid system in just a second but you're probably now wondering what are you going to do in the summer jim with all that insulation on the hive and the answer is i'm going to leave it on the hive this is a four season brood box they're going to live in this year round the insulation stays on in the summer and the winter and i don't have to take anything off put anything on this is where they're going to live and the next question i think is well how does that work all that insulation is going to bake them in the summer but it's not it isn't it's not gonna it's not gonna do that because insulation doesn't generate heat insulation just keeps heat from moving from one place to another it prevents heat from coming in in the summer and going out in the winter it doesn't create any heat the bees create heat the bees maintain their own temperature inside if i can keep the outside temperature influences off the bees cold in the winter heat in the summer they can spend more time inside taking care of brood and doing what bees do without all these outside influences making it so they have to cool the hive heat the hive worry about the brood maintain temperature the idea is that this insulation gives them a stable environment for them to do their work so i designed this to be a brood box so everything you see here from this point here going down is all insulated windproof water resistant you know it's it's for the bees to live in in the winter mainly and the summer but but this is all kind of customized from from here down from this line going up it's standard langstroth so when the flow is on i just put supers on top super super super everything's normal summertime the bees are all working up into the supers this is not insulated because it doesn't have to be in the summer this is going to be hot it's going to reduce faster from the nectar into the honey it but it's going to be warm it's a it's a good vent for for heat to get out but this doesn't need to be insulated and this is only on for a couple months a year once the flows are over and i remove the supers we're back down to brood box so really like eight or nine months of the year this is all the bees are living in this is their home this is what's important this is this is what matters in the hive is this box all right so let's talk about the frames and how i'm going to keep bees in this in this box so i do have eight frame boxes this is an eight frame langstroth deep on top of a medium so we have a nice deep cavity for the bees and the frames go all the way down to the bottom so i have these extra deep frames and as you can see i have seven frames and then i have a spacer here and a spacer here these are three quarter inch thick spacers so why are they there well i was thinking when i was building this that having eight frames going all the way across if the bees get a little bit wide with their comb pulling a frame out that's this long and deep is going to be a lot more challenging getting it all the way out of the box because there's going to be a lot of bees on it i don't want to roll bees i don't want to have queen problems and it just seemed like a little bit too tight so the plan is when i do an inspection i just come in i can nudge the frames over a little bit pull out this spacer which probably won't have a lot of bees on it and then i'm left with lots of space here to pull frames out if i really want to i can pull both spacers out and then have a lot of room in here to inspect okay there's a lot of wiggle room in here and the great thing about this is i can pull frames out inspect and put it right back and i don't have to have any outside frame hangers i don't have to dangle frames out or put them in other boxes everything can be inspected and put right back in the box so there's never going to be any frames outside they're always going to be in the box in this orientation i'll lift them up i'll put them right back in the same order so no more mixing around with frames and you know no more disturbances like that and when i'm done with the inspection the follow boards go right back in they just slide right down the sides and they're gonna touch the sides they go all the way in just like that so i did the math on this and i figured out that if you add up all the square inches of usable space on these frames seven of these frames is the equivalent of 13 standard langstroth d frames so this brood box is like a 13 frame deep brood box but with only seven frames so it's it's so much easier to inspect it's much easier to deal with and the bees have a lot more space than like a 10 frame deep or you know my old 8 frame deeps obviously it's also oriented vertically instead of wide so i think for the winter time especially bees have a much easier time moving up through frames to get to honey and they do moving across frames so i prefer far and away having a vertical orientation in our climate than a horizontal one another great thing about this configuration with these follow boards here is i can shorten the space up if i have a smaller colony or a weaker colony or if i'm going to install packages like i'm going to do tomorrow four of these frames here is the equivalent of seven deep frames so i would normally install my packages into eight frame deeps this is like a seven frame deep right here this right here so i pull my follow boards in and more space a little more insulation because why not and now you got four nice deep frames for them to go into and again this is the same space the same square inches as an seven frame deep and they come in and out right through here right into the center of the hive as they grow as they expand and fill up these frames you know i like i like the idea of restricting them to a small space it's kind of like a nuke you restrict them to a tighter space until they so they fill it out faster because it's hotter then you can just take the insulation out slide your board over and then add frames as they grow just like that you know and and if if the hive just doesn't really build up that much then they go through winter like this everything is cool you know just a little more insulation which never hurts and they have a nice tight space to manage and if they do grow enough then i can take this out and again back to seven of my extra deep frames all right so this is my brand new inner cover that i designed from the ground up let me explain what it's all about this is a two-sided inner cover so this side here has got your standard 3 8 inch gap this rim here is 3 8 of an inch which is standard kind of inner cover depth this side has a three quarter inch space so it's a little deeper on this side the the board is offset also this is half inch plywood so this is going to last a lifetime that that is i could stand on this this is really solid so we got a three-quarter space here and a three-eighths here in the summertime you're 3 8 down i have an upper entrance because i like upper entrances my bees like upper entrances 3 8 down all summer long what happens in the winter normally you take this off you add your shim your feeding shim and you put your cover back on i made it so that in the winter when i want to feed i just flip this thing over still have my upper entrance but now i have a three-quarter inch space underneath for feeding so no more extra shims no more feeding shims no more nothing this is four season inner cover so what's all that stuff on the top so let me take you through what these things do on the inner cover you got three holes up here there's um one is permanently vented with hardware cloth so that's always going to be a vent here that's open but it's always a vent these holes are beekeeper choice so we have two holes here let me take through the seasonal scenarios so we have summertime i'm probably gonna have these on vent so this is all vent vent vent so in the in the heat of the summer the heat can get out of the hive and the bees aren't gonna bake in there so that's fine in the fall when i want to feed i can just turn this to open open and i made it so i can put my feed buckets right on top of these holes okay so in the fall i can feed with two one gallon buckets so instead of having to keep coming up and putting a gallon of syrup on i can put two gallons on and walk away again this is half inch plywood so this is really solid it's gonna hold that up no problem so you got feed going down and you got moist air coming out of the vent so that's open so moisture can get out of the hive while the food's going down in so that's fall scenario late fall comes i'm gonna flip my cover and do winter feed so this comes off these can flip takes less than a minute and then here we are with three-quarter side going facing down for winter feed i can put sugar i can put you know fondant i can put whatever right on top of these frames and there's a space here for food and that goes down there and then in the winter time i can close these holes off to keep the heat down in there i'm going to put my new deep vent box right on top of there and fill this with burlap okay i can put a lot more burlap in here than i could with the other hive so i can put a lot of burlap in that is going to act as sort of a blanket it will act as insulation but there still will be a little hole here for moist air to get out so moist air can come up into the burlap and then the burlap will dry out through these vent holes in the front so this is not ventilation in the winter this is more of a wick getting moisture out of the hive so think of think of this as a wick not as a vent in the winter time so all winter long the bees are down there they are not being disturbed by the burlap everything is down there they have food on top of the frames they have their stores down in that brood box when i come up in on a warm day i can open this up peek down through this opening here which is always open and i can see activity i can see fondant level or sugar level right through this hole or if i want to peek further i can even open this side up here and look in these holes as well to see you know over there maybe oh there's some activity over there i have little windows to look down in okay but then i can close these off burlap goes back on so coming into late winter i take all this off i can put pollen patties right on the frame put this back i got that gap remember the gap underneath that inner cover everything goes back on it's still cold so there's still burlap in here still keeping things warm in here but if i want to give them a little stimulant a little bit of uh you know one-to-one syrup i can pull back that and i can feed right into this hole so that is a good feed hole there and if i want any ventilation at all i still have these over here to open for ventilation so i can ventilate or i can keep it shut i can feed right into this hole right in the center of the box and i can surround this with lots of burlap and pack this in which is what i got going on right now up in the b yard so it's all packed with burlap but i can still feed right in that hole and give them a stimulation of food right down directly into the brood nest so this is a lot of flexibility and then come summertime we're back to the 3 8 side i can flip these things back to the other side put everything down there and then we're back to ventilation ventilation ventilation and i can put this on for the summer with no burlap so this is a ventilation box for the summer as well all right so there it is that's the overview of the bee barn that's where it came from that's why i did it that's that's what it's all about and you're going to see a lot more of this this summer because this is going to be in the b yard and it's going to be full of bees as of tomorrow morning my bees are coming tomorrow so i spent a lot of time working on this thing ever since the bees died and i opened them up in march my brain started tweaking and i was just thinking about all the things i wanted to change and it was an opportunity to do something totally new um because i had no b's i can start over i spent like two months thinking about this designing it researching stuff and then about a last month and a half has been late nights building this thing and this is what i came up with it's it's very exciting i think it's everything that was wrong with a langstroth hive in my mind i i fixed it this is better for me and i think it's better for the bees this is like a win-win um i think they're gonna have a much more controlled environment to to live down here they have that big deep cavity that they can fill and do what they want with and it's easier for me because there's literally no boxes to lift when i do an inspection i take the lids off and i'm looking at frames and i put them down and i put the lids back on there's no boxes to move i don't have to lift anything in here this doesn't have to move ever this sits in the b yard and that's it so i'm totally excited about this and i can't wait to put the bees in it so let me know what you think in the comments i think this is going to be a record comment video so so tell me what you think down below and you'll be seeing a lot more of this hive once i put bees in it so stay tuned for that and i can't wait this is gonna be great so thank you for watching

Channel: Vino Farm

Views: 242,584

Keywords: bee boxes, beehive, beekeeper, beekeeping, brood box, how a beehive works, invention, langstroth, new hive, redesign, bee hive, langstroth beehive, langstroth hive, beehive styles, bee hive stand, langstroth beehive inner cover, honey bees, backyard beekeeping, bee hives explained, bee hives honey, beekeeping videos, invention ideas, langstroth beehive explained, bee boxes and frames, langstroth hive setup, langstroth hive stand

Id: z768OIA3bMo

Length: 29min 28sec (1768 seconds)

Published: Thu May 06 2021