Beekeeping

More Beekeeping Information

 

Movebable Frame or Langstroth Hive

 

The Moveable Frame or Langstroth Hive is made up of one or more hive bodies, which may be the same or different sizes. The largest hive body is variously referred to as a standard or deep super, deep-hive body and brood chamber. There is a range of smaller sizes down to a shallow super. A deper super is 9 5/8 in. (24.4 cm) deep, while a shallow super is 5 11/16 in. (14.4 cm) deep. All supers are 19 7/8 in. long by 16 1/4 in wide.

Commercial bee keepers typically use hive bodies that are all the same size, so that they are easily interchanged. Hobby bee keepers often use one or more shallow supers, separated from the deep supers by a queen excluder, for the bees to store surplus honey. When full of honey, the shallow supers are considerably lighter than the deep supers and easier to move.

In this first video the man describes the Langstroth Hive and shows how its parts go together.

 

The video below shows how to wire a Langstroth hive frame and embed the foundation wax. You can buy them already done when you are just a beginner, but you will find it very useful to be able to do your own.
Your frames may be different (might have a slot at top and bottom or be different heights) but think this should work well with most frames. Just make sure the wire is tight! This wire is heated with those two electrical wires I showed and the power supply in the background. DO NOT plug into the main supply this could kill you and/or burn your wax foundation. Use a transformer as in the video. If in doubt consult a competant, qualified electrician. The supply in the video is slow to heat up, but yours may be quick so experiment to see how long it takes to embed the wire. Apply gentle and even pressure to the foundation, you don't want to slice up your foundation sheet into 4 pieces by pushing it through the wires.