Langstroth hive

That's a good tease.

For my visual understanding what you're doing, instead of using a solid divider board in the standard Langstroth bottom deep, you're using queen excluder type material on that bottom, on that division board?

They're still solid divider boards and they are flush with the top of the deep hive body.

And then a queen excluder goes over top.

So as a design of a polystyrene form factor, you can go one of two ways.

Because the walls of the actual boxes are so thick from the polystyrene, you can either make the box outer dimension bigger, or you can keep the outer dimension the same as a wooden Langstroth box.

And the thickness is going to take away from the volume inside the hive.

And you're only going to be able to fit eight or nine frames.

I want to opt for a 10 frame configuration.

And the reason I want to is at the top of the box, there's interlocking, how do you say this, ridges that when one box sits over the other, they interlock.

The interlocking that I have on my current polystyrene box, which makes me know this requirement, The rim that goes around the inside that's raised, I can set a wooden Langstroth box on it and it mates up with it.

And I could take my current polystyrenes and put it over the wooden box and I can insert a wooden box in the middle of the poly stack.

Our value, of course, just like on insulation, is resistance to temperature change.

So as we all know from Dr. Seeley's work, naturally nesting bees will tend to choose a cavity of about 40 liters, which happens to be about the volume of one deep Langstroth hive body.

So one 10 frame deep, that is about the size that a natural colony in the wild, or well, like you said, naturally nesting that they will choose.

They will look very specifically for something that size.

Another thing about natural nesting colonies of bees is they want a small single bottom entrance and they tend to seal all the other openings, like think of it in a tree cavity, they seal all the other openings with propolis and reduce the entrance to about one and a quarter inches in diameter.

He pointed out that they show no preference for any certain type of tree species, which was funny because I'd forgotten that I had that question one time, but if bees liked one type of tree or the other, but they don't.

He said in these trees, the walls might be easily four inches thick with an R value of about four, whereas the Langstroth wall is about R.75, so not even R1 thick.

and because in natural cavities bees try to nest about 15 to 40 feet off the ground so there's enormous insulation both above and below them.

When we can direct beekeepers to those hands-on resources where they can talk to real beekeepers and really just They're going to be so good so fast because of these close-up experiences that they get to have during the class period.

One of the things I'm really looking forward to for our attendees to the course is often in a class, in a beginning beekeeping class, the speaker talks about whatever, a piece of equipment or extractor or a hive tool or a frame of honey or a Langstroth versus a top bar.

And it's just a picture and a PowerPoint slide.

And it's just, it's 2D.

And I run a more of a professional slash commercial style business because it's efficient.

And that's why I have to do.

But sometimes I've grabbed a long Langstroth hive or a top bar hive and I've taken it home because there's so much fun to do that.

And so not everything will inspire everyone, but there's always this one or two things over here that you didn't know about.

So it's about 130 pounds right now.

And it's a double deep Langstroth.

So that's about where I want to be.

I want to get them up closer to maybe 140, 150.

But the general gist is the hive format

is similar but different than a Langstroth.

The shape

is different.

We've got a lot going on.

I'll tell you about that in a second.

The inner cover had stripes from the top bars that sat underneath it in a 10-frame Langstroth, and they were propolis stripes.

The bees came and cleaned them off, stripped the entire thing down

Uh, yeah.

Um, a guy na- named, I believe it was Chris Langstroth-

... built, came up with that design, and it's all, it's all built on a 3/8ths bee space, which is the closest that he could get to mimicking what he found in nature.

But the main thing is in a hive that's wild, you can't remove frames to help the other colonies along.

So we knew it was important to us to keep to an ordinary size frame.

You can see me here, you can see I'm holding up a Langstroth deep frame.

We also have a Langstroth shallow frame, which actually is useful in a medium box.

But we didn't want to change that configuration of how a beehive gets put together.

We wanted it to be easy to inspect a beehive and not change that.

Okay, go.

Yeah, you're absolutely right.

And the biggest point of difference is looking here at this full depth Langstroth frame, we have eight sections across here and we call these sections cassettes.