The Pros and Cons of Beehive Types
Beekeeping is coming back into vogue almost as quickly as backyard chickens, and it's easy to see why. Bees are a fasinating, low maintenance livestock that provide honey, and boost garden production by as much as a third.
They're awesome, is whay I'm saying.
There are the three main types of Beehives, and each have their own strengths and weaknesses.
The Langstroth
The Langstroth hive is the standard beehive in modern beekeeping. Almost all the books, beekeeping supplies, and community support out there is based around the Langstroth.
Essentially this hive is a series of boxes stacked on top of one another. These boxes vary in height, but are otherwise the same demensions. Inside these boxes are easily removable frames where the bees build their honeycomb on plastic or beewax foundation. The honey is harvest once or twice a season, and the honeycomb is reused.
Since it take the bees a lot of energy (and Honey) to make wax saving the honeycomb from season to season results in higher honey yields.
Pros: Higher Honey Yields, Cross combing is rare, lots of information out there
Cons: seasonal maintenance requires heavy lifting, some questions about foundation cell size, any anti-biotics or miticides used tend to build up in the wax and get into the honey.
A good book on this type of hive is "Keeping Bees with Ashley English". It's informative and delightful, I felt like I could keep bees after reading it.
Top Bar Hive
Where the Langstroth have rectangular frames filled with foundation for the bees to draw their comb on, the Top Bar Hive has only the top bar that the bees attatch the honeycomb to. The lack of foundation makes them create their own honeycomb. This means the bees can decide exactly what sort of cell size they need. This allows the superorganism that is the hive to follow it's instincts more easily. This freedom makes this hive popular with the organic crowd of beekeepers.
There is more potential for cross-combing, which is where instead of one comb per bar the combs go at an angle across multiple bars. This is easily monitered and fixed at the early stages of comb development.
After the Bees have produced enough honey to get the hive through the next winter (varies) the honey comb is harvested continually throughout the rest of the season. These beehives are smaller, and the bees would quickly run out of space and swarm otherwise.
Top-bar hives are more easily built at home than the Langstroth,
Pros: Higher beeswax yields, more "natural", no heavy lifting.
Cons: Lower honey yields, more maintenance. honeycomb is somewhat prone to snapping off of the bar.
A good book on this type of hive is "Top Bar Beekeeping: Organic Practices for Honeybee health". I did have to read it more than once to really understand how to maintain this type of hive, but it's still pretty straitfoward, and I found myself inspired.
The Warre
Pronounced War-ray I believe this is the more obscure type of hive other there. It's essentially a vertical top-bar hive, where the bees are allowed to move downwards (In Langstroth they go from bottom to top).
As a combination of sorts of the previous two hive types it shares a lot of the same pros and cons with both the Langstroth and the Top Bar
Pros: Higher beeswax yields, more "natural",
cons: Lower honey yields, more maintenance, some heavy lifting, delicate honeycomb
I could only find one book specific to The Warre hive (which I haven't read) It's called "Natural Beekeeping with the Warre Hive" It has 4.7 stars on amazon, but only three reviews, so take that with a grain of salt.
Josh and I will not be able to keep bees this year, but when we can get a hive or two we're going to try out the Top Bar Hive. The main reason for us is that you don't have do any heavy lifting, but I also find letting the bees live as close to nature as possible extremely appealing.
What's your favorite?
