Beecentric Hive

Beehives Built For Bees

Beecentric Hive Diagram

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Beecentric Hive Component Diagram

Whether you’ve ordered a Beecentric Hive through the mail or your just curious about how it all goes together, we’re a brief overview of the Beecentric Hive components and how to assemble them.

The Beecentric Hive has four general components: the Vented Roof, the Screened Quilt Box, Bottom Board, and Boxes.

Top Assembly: Warre Hive Roof and Quilt Box

Vented Warre Roof

The Vented Roof is designed to shed the elements while allowing moisture to escape the Quilt Box. The roof is based on Warre’s original design and is slightly larger so that it can fit snugly over the vented quilt box. Bees do not occupy the space between the quilt and the roof.

Screened Quilt Box

The Quilt Box and Bottom Board are inverted versions of each other. The Quilt Box is deeper to accommodate insulation and sits on top of the hive, with the screened side facing down. The screened Bottom Board sits on the bottom of the hive with the screen facing up.

The Quilt Box is designed to insulate the roof and prevent heat from leaving through the top of the hive while also preventing condensation. When filled with insulation such as wood shavings, excess moisture is wicked from the hive and allowed to dissipate through the vented roof.

Honey and Brood Boxes

8 Frame Medium Boxes

Unlike a conventional Langstorth Hive, The Beecentric Hive uses medium boxes (and frames) for brood and honey. Using one size of box simplifies the management, reduces the need for a queen excluder and provides the flexibility to add boxes to the top (supering) or bottom (nadiring) when managing.

Because honey and brood are on medium farms, before harvesting, I remove any empty frames and condense all the brood and as much honey as I can into the lower box(es). Being able to move frames of honey into the overwintering boxes means that I do not need to rely as heavily on feeding. Excess honey is removed for harvest.

Deep Frame Adapter

A deep frame adapter is a shallow 2 7/8″ box that converts a medium into a deep. Adapters are useful for accepting deep frames from a nucleus colony or for anyone who wants to keep their brood in a deep box.

The deep frame adapter can be used to increase the depth of the quilt box for added winter insulation or used as a have-stand.

Bottom Assembly

The bottom of the BeeCentric Hive consists of a slatted rack, screened bottom board, entrance reducer, and coroplast insert.

Slatted Rack

The Slatted Rack provides an air gap between the hive entrance and the central space (boxes) where the bees tend their brood. This gap acts as a buffer between the temperamental outside world and the carefully maintained internal conditions of the beehive. Slatted racks:

  • Helps bee maintain their desired internal temperature and humidity within the hive.
  • Encouraged brood production all the way to the bottom of the lower frames.
  • Prevents driving wind and rain from entering the hive.
  • Offers an internal space for bees to beard on hot days.
  • Prevents the entrance from being blocks by dead bees during the winter.
  • Encourages winter cleansing flights.

Screened Bottom-Board

The screened bottom is similar in appearance to an inverted quilt box. The bottom board features a 1/8″ galvanized screen and bottom insert for performing mite checks and an integrated landing board. An entrance reducer is provided in order to reduce the opening to a naturally sized opening.

Stacking Beecentric Hive Components

When stacked on top of each other, the Beecentric Hive should resemble the following diagram. From the ground up; Bottom Board with large reducer, Boxes, Quilt Box with small reducer, Vented Roof.

Beecentric Hive, Expanded View

Beehive Entrances According to Honeybees

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Would Honeybees Choose Smaller or Larger Entrances?

Beehive Entrances are as varied as beekeepers who tend them, and there’s a lot of opinions on how large or small a beehive’s entrance ought to be. While it’s not uncommon for beekeepers to reducers their openings during colder periods, large entrances are common during honey flows.

But has anyone stopped to ask the bees? As it turns out, someone has. That someone, is Dr. Thomas Seeley, a world-renowned bee researcher working out of Cornel University. Seeley asked the bees by releasing swarms on a barren island and offering them the choice between different nest boxes. Their differences; entrances of 15, 30, and 60 cm². Dr. Seeley wrote about his finding, and many others, in his fantastic book, Honeybee Democracy. Here’s an excerpt:

If we gave a swarm of bees a 40-litre nest box with a 15 cm² entrance, they showed great interest in the box…There could be no doubt that the scout bees judged this box to be highly desirable… But after we enlarged the entrance opening to 60 cm²… the number of bees outside the box plummeted… This sudden abandonment of the box suggested that the scout were no longer attracted to it. … These results, confirmed by those obtained from a secoond swarm a few days later, taught us that scout bees judge a nest box with a 30 or 60 cm² entrance opening to be a low-quality, probably even unacceptable, homesite.

– Thomas D Seeley, Honeybee Democracy, Page 107

Beehive Entrance Dimensions

Thus, given a choice and everything else being equal, Dr. Seeley’s research concluded that bees have a strong preference towards small hive entrances. Interestingly, Seedey found no strong preference for the entrance shape.

Modern hives tend to have a short wide entrance that runs the width of the bottom board. This entrance can be made smaller with the addition of an entrance reducer. Fixing the hight of a hive’s entrance at 3/8″ (bee space) and translating Dr. Seeley’s research into rectangular hive openings of 15, 30, and 60cm² we get:

  • 15cm² Beehive Entrance = 2.33 inches² = (3/8″ bee space) high x 6.2″ wide
  • 30cm² Beehive Entrance = 4.65 inches² = (3/8″ bee space) high x 12.4″ wide
  • 60cm² Beehive Entrance = 9.30 inches² = (3/8″ bee space) high x 24.8″ wide

For comparison, the opening of a commercial langstroth hive without an entrance reducer can be as large as 11 square inches. That’s more than four and a half times larger than the entrance preferred by bees!! Why are we keeping bees in hives whose entrances are of “low-quality, probably even unacceptable”?

Why Do Honeybees Prefer Smaller Beehive Entrances?

While this study doesn’t answer all of the questions – do bee prefer entrances of 10 cm² over 15 cm²? At what point does a colony judge an opening to be too small? – it does strongly suggests that bees prefer small entrances over large ones. This preference could be because smaller entrances are more easily defended. Beekeepers know that adding reducers deters robbing. It could also be that smaller openings prevent bees from drifting between nearby colonies. Less drift could mean less disease transfer. Then again, wild colonies tend widely spaced.

Another reason for this preference could be that small entrances make it easier for bees to regulate the internal temperature and humidity of the colony. My hunch is that it’s less work to cool than heat the hive. Colder temperatures cause the bees to cluster around the brood and heat it with their bodies. I hypothesize that hives with smaller entrances might be more active as fewer resources and time would be required to maintain the correct internal temperature and humidity.

Beecentric Beehive Entrances

The Beecentric Hive comes with two entrances and two entrance reducers. Built into the screened IPM bottom board, the bottom entrance has a reducer with an opening of 13 cm² (exact dimensions 3/8″ by 5.5″), which is in alignment with the preference of honeybees. Removing the reducer reveals a 30 cm² opening, but I leave the reducer on year-round; summer and winter. The bees have no problems defending a 13 cm³ entrance, and it’s large enough to accommodate heavy honey flows.

The hive has an upper entrance built into the Warre style top-quilt and a reducer with a 1.8 cm² opening. While bees can use this as an entrance, its primary functions as ventilation. Since the Beecentric Hive has a screened top-quilt, I generally keep my top-entrance closed by tipping the reducer ninety-degrees. I sometimes open it in early spring when bees are making cleaning flights. This top-entrance is probably unnecessary, but easy to close-up and offers more options.

8 Frame vs 10 Frame Hives

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Why I Use 8 Frame Beehives

Frame Geometry and Perpendicular Movement

The geometry of a beehive is such that bees – especially an overwintering cluster – can easily move parallel to the frames (up/down, front/back) but have a difficult time moving perpendicular (side to side) between them.

Imagine a bee walking along the face of a frame of drawn out comb. The bee can effortlessly walk front and back or up and down along the two-dimensional surface accessing resources; but if the bee wants to move from one side of the frame to another, it has to first walk to the edge of the frame, around the perimeter, and cross over to the to the other side.

This geometry is especially relevant for overwintering bees. As the temperature decreases in the fall, the bees cluster together at the base of the hive to conserve heat. The cluster is a loose sphere of bees – roughly six to eight frames wide – with a tighter outer mantle that moves as a unit to conserve heat. The critical thing to realize is that the frames run through the cluster so, like individual bees, the cluster can move parallel (front/back, up/down) but not perpendicular (side to side). A perpendicular moving cluster has to disassemble, walk around the outside of the frames, and regroup – losing heat in the process.

Simply put, a narrower hive reduces the need for the cluster to move laterally.

Access to Honey

In his book, Honeybee Democracy, bee researcher Thomas D. Seeley describes natural hives as being tall and narrow. Narrower makes sense considering that side to side movement is difficult for winter clusters but the second benefit is that honey that would have been stored beside the cluster is now stacked above it.

During cold winter months, breaking the cluster isn’t an option so the result is that the bees can’t easily access honey stored beside them. This reluctance to move laterally explains why many beekeepers report starvation despite there being a frame or two of honey (always the outermost frames) mear inches from the starved cluster. By placing more honey above the bees, the resources in an eight frame hive are more accessible.

Increase Winter Survival Rates With 8 Frame Beehives

So why eight frames? Simply put, the overwintering cluster of bees is roughly eight frames in diameter. By sizing the hive to the wintering cluster, we’ve mostly eliminated the need for them to move perpendicular. In an eight frame hive, the cluster can concentrate on keeping warm and move up as a group to access honey stored above them which is more accessible than honey stored beside them.

5 Common Hive Problems And How To Fix Them

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Common Problems With The Design of The Modern Langstroth Beehive And How To Fix

Common Design Flaws of Langstroth Hives
Design Flaws of the Langstroth Hive

The modern Langstroth hive has revolutionized the beekeeping world and is by far the most successful hive design on the planet. Langstroth’s discovery of bee-space and the creation of the movable frame was such a game-changer than it single-handily enabled the commercial beekeeping industry that we see today. Unfortunately, some aspects of the design [Read more…]

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