Your New Beehive was Millennia in the Making
Your new beehive is a man-made artificial environment designed to provide honey bees with a comfortable home that is optimized to allow humans to protect, inspect, feed, and care for the bee colony and occasionally harvest honey from it.
This design of the Langstroth hive with is removable frames is based on millennia of study and observation, and its principals have been largely unchanged for the past 170 years. It may not be perfect, but I recommend that you do not make any changes to this successful design until you have a few years of experience.
If the bees don’t like their home or it becomes too cramped, they will move out, an action called swarming. Your job as a beekeeper is to keep them happy, healthy and well fed in their home so that the colony does not die or leave. That starts with setting up the hive to their liking.
Your new beehive is designed around a concept called bee space. That means the hive components fit together in a manner optimized to make the bees happy and comfortable without too much empty space. If you leave out a frame or otherwise mess up the bee space, the bees will fill the extra space with wax or propolis, making it difficult to access that part of the hive. In other words, you can really gum up the works if you leave out a part.
Let’s get to the meat and potatoes of this guide, starting from the ground up. Click the numbers below to move through the pages of this guide.
