Getting into beekeeping and deciding what you need to buy and what you don’t can make you dizzy. There are so many different products for beginners and different opinions on how to start off that it is hard to know what is best for you and for the bees. Originally I had planned to build my own top-bar hive as our first hive but I decided to save that project for another day and start off with a beginner’s bee kit.
There are basically two types of hives utilized by beekeepers from what I have read, and a third type that is much less common but simple to construct. The most common hive, the one that most people think of when they think about keeping bees and the one I decided to purchase, is called a Langstroth Hive. The Langstroth Hive consists of several wooden boxes or “supers” stacked on top of one another. Each super contains wooden or plastic frames on which the queen lays her eggs called “brood” and the lower two supers are called brood boxes. A queen excluder rests on top of the two brood boxes and separates them from the next super which is the honey super. The queen excluder, as it’s name implies, allows the worker bees to pass into the honey super to store honey but it prevents the queen (who is larger than the worker bees) from entering, thus preventing her from laying eggs in the honey super. This hive format allows for easy inspection of the hive and it makes it easier to harvest the honey. The next type of hive is the top-bar hive; rather than utilizing stacked supers to hold the frames a top-bar design holds all of the frames along a single horizontal plane and the bees construct their hive horizontally rather than vertically. Anyone with even basic carpentry skills and a table saw can construct a top bar hive relatively easy and cheaply. The only drawback it seems is that it is not as easy to harvest the honey from this particular set up. A “gum hive” is what I would call a mountain man’s hive or a pioneer hive. A hollow section of a tree, about three feet long, is cut; a simple bottom board and top cover are attached to the hollow log and tree holes are drilled into it which serve as the entrances/exits to the hive. This is probably the least convenient hive set up for harvesting honey but it would make a great hive for pollination purposes.
After a lot of research we decided to purchase a complete beginners kit produced by Dadant, rather than building a top-bar hive. I’m not here to advertise any brand or say that one brand is better than another but I felt that the kit by Dadant was a better choice for us. Unlike a lot of the other kits manufactured by other companies, the Dadant kit came with a completely assembled and painted Langstroth style hive. I don’t mind putting things together myself or building them from scratch but I felt that my time reserved for beekeeping would be better spent initially on research rather than on building hives. Eventually I will build a top-bar hive and possibly a “gum” hive made out of a hollow tree but that will be more of a project for me to do with my son rather than a project out of necessity.
Dadant’s assembled starter kit came complete with two brood boxes with frames and foundation, one medium super or honey super with frames, a bottom board with an entrance reducer, inner and outer covers, a hive tool and brush, a queen excluder, an entrance reducer, gloves and veil, a smoker with fuel and a bee book. I thought it was a pretty good deal for the money and I was satisfied with the quality when I received it.
There are still a few more items that we need to purchase, including the bees, but the kit came with most everything for starting off. We aren’t going to start beekeeping until the 2015 season but I wanted to order the kit ahead of time so I could start setting up our bee yard and build a custom table to support the hives. If you are getting into beekeeping I would recommend this product or one similar to it from another company. Thanks for reading and we plan to write more on beekeeping next year!
Lumberjack.
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