Tuesday, April 24, 2012

THE LANGSTROTH BEE HIVE

Langstroth Hive, Your Vital Beekeeping Supplies

Are you serious to expand your beekeeping business? Then, managing an apiary for honey beekeeping is a strategy that is worth to be considered. Building an apiary of your own is quite simple, as I once told you. You can just rent a piece of land that is near to nectar sources to ease your bees to collect nectar.

Other things to consider and to attend to are the temperature of your apiary location where you should consider a place with a maximum temperature that isn’t too hot. Security of your hives as well as the safety of passing people should be taken care. And to avoid the bees leaving the hive, avoid windy places.

Now, let us talk about a beekeeper supply which is most vital to your apiary honey business. The bee hive. This is the housing of your little creatures, which are going to work for you to collect nectar and transform it into honey. And talking about bee hives, the name of Langstroth should be taken into consideration.

Lorenzo Lorraine Langstroth, a Reverend from Philadelphia is the gentleman who invented the movable bee hives which today become the reference and standard of beehive construction all over the world. His invention in 1851 is considered a milestone in beekeeping.

The main advantage is that bees are encouraged to build their honeycombs into movable frames. The design of the frame is such so that the bees are not able to attach wax between frames or to the hive wall. Bees are also disabled to use propolis to cement the frames to the box sides. This movable frames makes it easier for the beekeeper to perform his delicate task, which was impossible in the past time.

The typical Langstroth hive is constructed in such way so that the frames are separated from the surrounding parts of the hive. This includes all walls, the floor, the cover of the hive and other frames. The frames are the spots where the bees build their comb. The Langstroth design has set an exact separation gap of 3/8 inch or 6.35 mm.

Removing a frame from a hive will be much easier since the beekeeper does not need to cut any combs which were the problem in the earlier hive design. Formerly, the beekeeper had to cut the adhered frames to the adjacent structures which were cemented by the bees using propolis. Removing the honeycombs easily provides practicality to a beekeeper to manage multiple hives on a regular basis in a very safe way.

The standard Langstroth hive includes (from top to bottom):
  • A telescoping cover
  • Inner cover
  • One or more supers or hive bodies
  • Queen excluder (optional)
  • 8 – 10 frames of various sizes this include a cell foundation
  • Brood box
  • Bottom board
  • Hive stand

Setting up an apiary with multiple hives is quite an easy task, since there are plenty of beekeeping kits available which include the beehives. You just decide how you are going to expand your business. You can judge this using your past experience of beekeeping. Good luck and great success!