10F Langstroth wooden beehive (no supers)

01 · WHY NO SUPER

The super goes on when the colony has run out of room below, not before

A young colony fills its brood box before it needs storage space: brood goes into the central combs first and the stores to the sides, and only when that box is worked almost end to end does a super make sense. Adding it too early spreads the bees through a volume they cannot keep warm, and in a cold spring that slows the queen down. So this configuration is not an unfinished hive: it is what you need to move up a nucleus that is going to grow, to replace a damaged brood box, or to start out without yet buying honey-house equipment you will not use for months.

02 · WHAT ARRIVES

Assembled and with the ten frames inside; all it needs is foundation

It arrives put together, with nothing to nail. In the box you get the floor, the brood body with its 10 wired Hoffman frames, the crown board, the roof and the metal entrance strip. The wood is pine and leaves the works with one coat of linseed oil, which feeds the timber and gives it that honey tone but is not a varnish: outdoors, pine greys within a season or two, and it pays to go over the outside every one or two, always with the hive empty and dry. Inside nothing is painted or oiled — the bees see to that with propolis. The frames come wired but without foundation: you will need Langstroth-format sheets.

03 · DIMENSIONS

Inside, the format decides; outside, the wall thickness does

It is the question that comes up most, and it answers in two halves. Inside, the maker does not choose the measurement: a ten-frame Langstroth body runs around 465 × 380 mm, which is what ten frames of 48 × 23 cm take up hanging from their rebates. That is why any Langstroth super, crown board or queen excluder on the market fits it, and why Dadant frames do not. Outside, add the wall thickness on each side: on this hive it runs from 22 to 25 mm, and those three millimetres are also what separates a rigid box from one that warps over the years. If you are building a stand to measure, measure the hive you receive before cutting anything.

04 · BEFORE YOU BUY

It comes with the standard closed wooden floor, not an open mesh floor: there is no tray for reading the natural varroa drop, so if you monitor by counting you will need a different floor. And it is always supplied with its frames; the box is not sold on its own.