Bees

We got bees a while back. We got the hives in pieces and assembled them. The lid was already put together but the boxes had to be assembled and the frames that hang down inside had to be assembled and then the foundation placed in the frames. Then we painted the exterior. We used white because it will help keep the hives cooler in the summer time.

The big bottom boxes are called "brooders" and the smaller box on top is called a "super" but from what I gather the terms are kind of interchangeable. All boxes can be called supers and large or small boxes can be used for brooders. Left alone, the bees will use the entire space for raising brood, storing nectar, and making and storing honey.

You can get a screen separator called a "queen excluder" to put between the brooder and the super that has openings large enough to allow the workers to move through it but the queen cannot because she is too large. This would keep the brood all in the bottom box and the top box would only be used for honey storage (and maybe pollen? I'm not sure).

Ours is all open from one section to the other. Some folks use two big brooder boxes on the bottom and then the queen excluder and one or more supers on top. We don't use an excluder yet because the bees will be busy building up their population and storing food for winter. They will need all the stored honey and pollen they can acquire. Their ability to gather nectar and pollen is hindered this year because they are small in number and raising brood has been delayed while they acclimate to their queen and she begins to lay.


Looking inside the top of one of my hives. This is the weaker hive and there are not many bees and not much activity.

In the foreground is a quart canning jar with sugar syrup (one part table sugar to one part water) with three small holes punched in the lid. The jar is turned upside down and the bees eat this syrup while they are getting established. I had three jars in each hive when I first set them up.

You can see that the jar is sitting on the frames hanging in the bottom box. Some of the frames in the top box have been removed to make space for the feeder jars. The frames just hang in the box like file folders in a filing cabinet.


Inside each frame is wax foundation. It is pre-stamped with a pattern that the bees use as a basis for building their comb. This helps keep the comb lined up and orderly, and makes it easier to check the hives to be sure there aren't any diseases, parasites, mice, or other problems, and that the queen is laying and things are proceeding well.

The foundation I have has very thin wire stamped into it to help support it a little bit. As thin as this foundation is, the bees will draw it out some as they make their combs and it will become even thinner.

We've only had bees about two or three weeks now and I've already made a couple of mistakes. I'll post about that in the future.