Bargain Beekeeping
"Good fortune accrues to the souls of the elite" ( Warré, Émile - Translated from: 'L'Apiculture Pour Tous' (12th ed., 1948) by Patricia and David Heaf).
Beekeeping is an expensive pass-time if you go for the version in the popular imagination. Most people living in developed western countries will have the image of a white hive with a sloping roof in mind when they think about beehives:
(image from: https://pixabay.com/photos/beehive-wbc-hive-996396/)
Currently, you could expect to spend more than £500 and probably closer to £1000 getting going with a new hive and colony and equipment (especially if you want to buy an extractor). Most ‘western’ bee keeping systems have a large brood box and smaller units (‘supers’) to go on top from which the honey is harvested. A queen excluder keeps the queen in the brood box, and honey is extracted from frames in the supers.
This method of beekeeping is not just expensive, but fairly time consuming and requires significant intervention. This type of beekeeping however, is not the only option out there. There are low cost, low intervention methods.
Two very popular ‘People’s Hives’ are the Warré Hive and some version of the Horizontal Hive.
The Warre Hive
(Image from https://www.flickr.com/photos/naturewise/4727260730)
The Warré Hive is a top bar hive that aims to mimic the natural hollow of a tree trunk by having a smaller volume in the brood box and the bees are allowed to build wax downwards continually. It also has the benefit that all the boxes are the same size. Boxes are added at the base of the hive and one box is removed from the top to harvest the honey.
The Warré hive is named after Abbé Émile Warré, a French priest who spent many years studying hive design and wanted to produce a hive that everyone could own. He called it ‘The People's Hive’. It was to be made of cheaply available timber and not to require very much attention. Warré claimed that he could get the management time down to an hour and a half per year to a hive. His mission was to make cheap, easy and naturalist bee keeping available to everyone.
The hive was designed to be frameless so instead of having frames, bars are put across the top in rows and then bees build comb down from the bar and produce ‘wild comb’ (i.e comb that is not based on some form of foundation). The bees can be encouraged to build along the line of the bar by pouring strip of molten beeswax down the length of the centre of the bar. Once set these strips act as a starter for the comb that is to be laid down on the underside of the bar. Top bar hives can also use 'comb guides' either as an inverted triangular profile (imagine a mini upside down roof on the underside) or as a half circular design. This provides the bees with a lowest point to build down from.
Once the top box is removed the cone is cut out and crushed against a sieve to extract the honey. There are also presses and other extractors to do this job.
When the new box is inserted at the bottom of the hive (not the top) new comb is built down from the bars. Putting boxes on the bottom rather than on the top is called nadiring. This mimics the natural process of bees which build downwards. It is claimed to reduce swarming.
There are practitioners who super (on top) during periods of high nectar flow as well as nadiring because they say the bees do not have time to build the additional storage needed if they are to take full advantage of the nectar
flow.
The advantage of wired comb is the fact that it can be put into a centrifugal extractor to extract the honey. Less pollen goes into the extracted honey and may affect the quality of the honey - one reason commercial farmers or would prefer wired frames. Frames allow much greater management and intervention. Wired frames also provide more support. When handling top bar comb much more care has to be taken when handling wild comb in order not to break it. Frames are convenient. They allow the reuse of comb and the easy harvesting of honey.
There are now wired frames for the Warré hive.
Warré Hive resources:
There are a lot of tutorials on this page from the Warre Store:
https://www.thewarrestore.com/for-new-beekeepers
What is a Warré Hive:
https://beebuilt.com/pages/Warré-hives
Low cost Warré hive build:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1KVn-NZTfus
Excellent site from David Heaf:
http://www.bee-friendly.co.uk/
Abbé Émile Warré’s book: “Beekeeping for All” available free here:
http://www.bee-friendly.co.uk/
What Hive? (really like the idea of a live leaf litter floor):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQb-kTWAqVA&t=1512s
Honey Harvest:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7VtoRyqxXk&t=412s
Horizontal Top Bar Hives
These hives are long rather than tall. Two examples of ‘People’s Hives’ are the Layens Hive and the Kenyan Top Bar Hives. Georges de Layen wrote: “Keeping Bees in Horizontal Hives: A Complete Guide to Apiculture”. Georges de Layens was a French apicurist and botanist. The Layens Hives can use wired frames with foundation, frames without foundation or just top bars. Layens hives are popular even though buying the foundation remains a cost, if you use foundation. Layens hive beekeepers also use comb guides or wax starters.
There are a wide range of straight sided Top Bar Hives, one example being the Golden Hive. (So called because of its use of the Golden Ratio in its dimensions.)
An example of a top bar hive with sloping slides (Kenyan Top Bar Hive style) is shown below:
(Image from: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d2/Top_Bar_Bee_Hive.jpg))
Please note - de Layens hives resemble long, deep chests with straight vertical sides and gable (or flat) rooves.
De Layens hives are based on two principles:
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Use local, indigenous bees.
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Keep them in appropriate hives that require minimal management and mimic the cavity size of a hollow tree (in terms of depth).
Horizontal hives mimic the natural environment of a tree hollow by allowing the bees to build downwards continuously in taller frames. There are claims that bees do not travel well horizontally through frames during the winter to feed, however this is countered by the argument that bees have actually difficulty changing direction during the winder and the colony is managed to be mainly at one end at the start of winter and then allowed to move in one one direction through frames with stored honey or food.
There are claims that the Layens Hive is the world's most popular hive. The hive has large frames and the box is 75.4 cm long, 42.4 cm wide and 50.7 cm high. There is an introduction to beekeeping with the Layens hive here.
Using similar principles to the Layen's hive is Bill Summer's Zest hive. This is a horizontal hive based on the depth of 2 National Brood Boxes. Crucially this hive is made from aircrete blocks and is therefore highly insulated. Plans are free from the site. Bill talks of extending the hive to use the same principle with Langstroth Frames. but I see no reason why just about any hive cannot be 'Zestified' as an aircrete build.
The Kenyan Top Bar (KTBH) hive has walls that slope inwards towards the bottom. This stops the bees attaching comb to the sides, making management easier. The KTBH is top bar and frameless (like the original Warré hive).
Here’s a plan of the Layens Hives:
https://lowtechinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/layenshive.pdf
Layens frames building instructions:
https://horizontalhive.com/how-to-build/layens-hive-frame-plans.shtml
More Leyan’s hive parts here:
https://horizontalhive.com/how-to-build/hive-frame-swarm-trap.shtml
Here is a step by step guide to building the Layens hive.
Lazutin Hives are also deep horizontal hives.
There is an account of a Layens hive apiary here.
Here’s a Kenyan (KTBH) style top bar hive:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovOt80CcZkU
And here’s the Beekeeping manual from Action for Positive Change (KTBH plans and dimensions given):
Here are simple plans for a KTBH.
The Barefoot Beekeeper - pioneers the concept of 'Balanced Beekeeping'. He has lots of information on free/ low cost beekeeping - including obtaining free bees. Given that we are living through human made climate crisis I think it is only reasonable that we intervene to help ensure there are as many bees as possible.
Here's the Oxfordshire Natural Beekeeping Group.
International promotion of sustainable beekeeping:
https://beesfordevelopment.org/
Bees for development journal here:
https://beesfordevelopment.org/news/new-journal-free-to-download/
Why bees are necessary for sustainable development:
Here are 38 free DIY beehive plans
Beesource.com is a series of beekeeping forums.
Bee Kind Hives has a section on Bee-Centred Beekeeping.
The Natural Beekeeping Trust can be found here.
The Heretics Guide to Beekeeping takes an unusual approach and features unusual hybrid hives.
END NOTE:
This is not the finished product. There is a multiplicity of hive types possible, with variants and hybrids (for example there is a version of the Golden Hive that uses a Warré style cushion).
Next steps:
Create page of free pdf's plans and beekeeping books.
Add a subsection of Golden hives and other HTBH's)