While much of the world, including us, uses Langstroth style 8-frame or 10-frame hives, there is a large segment of people in eastern Europe and parts of Russia that have been using horizontal hives for a long period of time.

The horizontal hive is designed to have all of the frames on one level.  The box we built is able to handle up to 34 frames in a single row.  During much of the year, there will only be about 8-10 frames or so in the hive and we will insert a separator board inside on the end where the frames stop to keep the hive compact.  Once the spring buildup starts, and then the honey flow comes on, we will be adding frames to the hive as needed to allow for the increase in brood and ultimately honey collection. We have built our box to take the standard Langstroth frame size to preserve the interchangeability with our existing equipment.

There are several main advantages of the horizontal hive.  Horizontal hives allow a beekeeper to manage the hive with more flexibility to meet the needs of the bees, since we are not limited to multiples of 10 frames per box as well as manage the hive with much less interference of the bees, since we do not have to remove upper hivebody boxes to inspect or deal with the lower boxes.  When the honey is removed, instead of removing a whole box and radically changing the shape of the hive, we are merely removing frames from one side of the hive, frames that the bees have set aside for storage of the honey.  Since we are not limited to having to remove 10 frames of honey at a time, we can remove more or fewer frames depending on the size of the honey crop that each hive has collected.  This enables  to more easily ensure that we leave enough honey for the bees to make it through the winter.

Another advantage of the horizontal hive is that we were able to build the sides out of 2x lumber, giving twice as much insulating value as the standard  3/4 inch wall thickness.  We can also add additional insulation to the sides without affecting the number of frames in the hive.

The main disadvantage to the horizontal hive is that it is not portable like the regular hives.  This shouldn’t be a problem since most of our hives are not being moved around once they are in place.

We will put the hive you see here into use come this spring.  We look forward to seeing how this hive will make life better for the bees and easier for us.