The Langstroth Bee Hive
The Langstroth Hive is named after its inventor, Reverend L. L. Langstroth. Rev. Langstroth published a book in 1853 that moved beekeeping forward in leaps and bounds. It was called, Langstroth's Hive and The Honey-bee, The Classic Beekeeper’s Manual.
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He had made a close study of bees and beekeeping and had learned more this way than anyone before him. As you have probably guessed, the techniques he taught then are still in use today.
The Langstroth Hive is one of the most common designs of bee hive in use worldwide today and many of the others are based on this design. The Langstroth Beehive is what is called a movable frame beehive. The frame is a rectangular wooden surround that holds the combs. There are usually nine or ten of these per super. The super is the "box" that the frame hangs in. Box is in quotes because it is really not a box at all. There is no top or bottom on the box. You hang the frames in the super and if it is a honey super you put a queen excluder under the frames. The queen excluder prevents the queen from entering that super from the brood body below. You exclude the queen to stop her from laying eggs in the combs there and messing up your honey combs. Bees or at least the queen, will mix brood cells and honey cells.
The queen lays all the eggs and seems to lay wherever she can. The worker bees put the honey in any nearby cell. So in an unsupervised hive the brood cells and the honey cells would be side by side or in groups; basically scattered randomly throughout the combs.
The beekeeper does not want this to happen, because the eggs and larvae get into the honey when it is being harvested and if there are a lot of them you lose a lot of bees that way. Though the latter is usually not an issue.
The first one or two supers, the brood body, are usually reserved for the brood combs and are deeper than the supers above. Above that all the supers are for the honey. However the bees can mix the cells in the brood area if they want to and they usually do. But the beekeeper does not interfere with them.
Another great thing about the Langstroth Hive is that with this system the hive can be extended or reduced based on the population and success of the hive just by adding another super.
In the video below, "The BEE GUY" installs a new colony of bees in a Langstroth Hive.


