Building Layens horizontal bee boxes

We’re building deep-frame Layens horizontal bee boxes, based on Dr. Leo Sharashkin’s design and plans. These boxes are the insulated version, and we take you through the process and some of the pitfalls.
As we prepare for Spring, this is an exciting development in our homesteading plans. We get prepared for capturing bees with Layens swarm hives and transitioning the frames to his insulated bee boxes. These boxes can take up to 20 frames but only require the removal of a lid to both maintain and extract the honey!! It may be the perfect design for a homesteader looking to add this production and pollination resource to the small farm. Come check it out.
For the plans, see www.horizontalhives.com.
Tractor: Kubota L3560 Limited Edition
RTV: Kubota X1140
Mower: TORO Titan 60”
Log splitter: County Line 25ton
Dewalt 20V drivers, impact wrenches and drills
Miter saw and rolling stand: Dewalt DWS716/Dewalt DWX726

[@followme8238]

Lol you went way off script with the assembly, but in the end you had a hive.

[@beebob1279]

Your question about Langstroth his is simple. Easy to stack and move for pollination. Produce a pile of honey. The negatives are they get heavy. They are more expensive if you buy the equipment. I’ve done Langstroth for about twenty four years. As with most bee equipment, it’s starting to break down. And so is my back. So I’m learning the Layens hive and using scrap wood to build them

[@appalachianheartsong5487]

Thanks for commenting Bob. The Layens hive has worked well for me, but I am focused more on pollination than honey. Horizontal Hives will claim that the bees separate the honey from the brood frames naturally, but I have not found this to be the case. They do tend to concentrate honey on the end frames but only in the latter months after brood production slows. At least half the honey in my hives is in the top third of each frame with brood below it. If you get serious about switching I think you will want a queen excluder, which is something you are very familiar with already given your experience. Cheers, Dan

[@TheMule71]

@@appalachianheartsong5487 That's how they are supposed to work. They whole idea of layens frames is to leave enough room at the top of the frame for honey, even if it's a brood frame. That's the hive storage for winter. That's why they are taller that wider. The point is NOT to fully separate brood from honey, unless that's more than the bees need. Extra honey goes to the side further away from the entrance. That you can harvest, as it isn't used in winter because the bees can't reach it anyway. Bees pack in a ball. When the queen stop laying, they are at the bottom of the frames. During winter they slowly move up, consuming stored honey. They don't really move sideways. Those lateral frames full of honey can be effectively unreachable by the bees in winter. The cons are that you can't harvest all honey produced by the bees. The pros are that you don't need to worry about feeding them. That fits a natural low disturbance beekeeping, not a commercial one, which makes use of every drop of honey bees produce but has to feed them with (way cheaper) sugar when needed. You can adapt horizontal hives (you can make honey supers for them) to some extent to produce more honey, but at the end of the day most commercial beekeepers need to be nomadic anyway, and horizontal hives are not that easy to move around by design, compared to the stacks of boxes of vertical hives.

[@lindahaydon2318]

Think about putting an electric fence around the hives to prevent the bears from getting to them. I learned the hard way when they destroyed mine.

[@appalachianheartsong5487]

Hey Linda, thanks for joining the conversation. Erik told me you had some bad experiences with the bears, so I will definitely plan on extending the wire from the pasture over to the apiary. Thanks for the advice. We’ll see, the bears are definitely around and not shy, they were even on the side porch of the house.