Starting a Brand New Bee Hive

It’s that time of year! Not quite spring yet, still a little cold outside. If you’ve dreamed of keeping bees to help save the planet, or just for the delicious honey, it’s the perfect time of the year to start! And here’s what you need to know.

Your best course of action to start, is to find your local Beekeeper’s Association. Most of them will have pages on Facebook, and they will be mostly full of older men. Or at least they were when I first started. But they should be eager to help out a newbie. They will answer all your questions and concerns with years of experience.

The first step to starting a hive is finding a place for your bees. Do you have a yard? Go outside and look for a flat spot that will get plenty of sun all day long. Are you going to be putting the bees somewhere that’s not your own yard? You will have to go to that place and look for a flat, sunny spot for your bees. It’s very important that your bees get enough sun throughout the day. The bees can tell between day and night based on the heat the sun radiates into the hive. The warmth of the sun also lets the bees know when the weather is good and sunny or bad and rainy and dangerous. And you will want a wood pallet or something else flat that the hive can rest on that isn’t the ground. Got some cinder blocks or bricks? Those work too. You can get creative and cheap for this step if you’d like.

Once you’ve found a good spot for your bees, lets talk about the anatomy of a hive. Most hive kits you can buy will give you all the parts of the hive you will need, but it’s still good to know whats going on. Directly on top of your pallet or base layer, you have the hive stand. Above that, is a baseboard. These two layers combined will make the entrance of your hive. Sometimes this base board layer is a screen, so you can put a “sticky board” underneath to test for and trap Varroa mites.

This “sticky board” is usually a plastic board that you can spray or wipe on vegetable oil. The screen on the baseboard prevents the Varroa mites from re-entering the hive. I’ll have a more detailed blog on mite treatment and prevention in the future.

The next part of the hive is called the “super.” These are the boxes that contain the frames where the bees do their work. There are two main kinds of supers: deep and shallow. There’s a medium size too, but that’s less common, so I’m not going to focus on that. Your hive should start off with one deep super, and only add the second deep super as they fill up the first. The deep super is where all the brood, baby bees, are born. This is where they keep the food they need. You will never take honey from these two layers, this is what the bees need to survive the winter especially in colder climates.

Once they fill these base two layers, then you know the bees should be able to survive the winter, and you can add a shallow super. These are the tiny boxes that you will actually take the honey from. You need to add them one at a time like the deep supers. I would personally only recommend using two shallow supers at a time, but I’ve seen plenty of beekeepers use three. I absolutely would not have more than three supers on a hive at one time.

Some beekeepers put a “queen excluder” between the deep and shallow supers, however I would only recommend this if you are having issues with your queen laying eggs in a shallow super. Otherwise it’s mostly unnecessary.

Frames. These are where the bees store everything. From brood to honey to pollen. Everything the bees need, they will store in the frames. It is very important that you use wax frames. The bees do not like plastic. Avoid plastic at all costs. I know its a little bit cheaper, but your bees will be so much happier with real wax or real wood. I’ll find pictures of the plastic frames I’ve seen for a future blog post.

The last parts of the hive are the inner and outer lids. There are two lids because bees will glue the entire hive together and if you don’t want the lid to be completely stuck onto the hive, you need the inner lid.

Now that we’ve discussed the hive itself, there are a few other accessories to discuss. You will need a smoker. Look, I know this tool was villainized in the Bee Movie as a “smoking gun” but it’s a really important part of a beekeeper’s arsenal. The inside of a beehive is completely dark, there are no little bee sized light bulbs in there. So the bees do their work and communicate with each other entirely by feel and smell. The point of using the smoker is to disrupt their sense of smell, so they can’t tell each other to attack the intruder. They don’t understand that you’re in the hive to help them, so you have to trick them.

I mentioned earlier that the bees glue the whole hive together, which brings me to the second accessory. A hive tool. My mom says this is an essential tool for life. As she uses it almost every day, whether we’re going out to the hives or not. In fact, we have three of them because my mom would be lost without it. It’s sharp on each end, but one side is straight and the other curves, so you can pry apart the boxes and frames. You cannot do this by hand. These are also very easy to set down and lose in the grass despite the bright colors, or maybe I was too young when I started to be trusted to remember where I set things down. But either way, I recommend getting two.

And lastly, your suit. You don’t wanna get too stung up right as you’re starting your hive, but if you’re anything like me, you’ll start to forego pieces and parts of your suit until you’re going out to check in just the veil. My first bee suit consisted of a Tyvec™ under layer that covered my whole body, a canvas jacket attached to a hat and veil to cover my face, and leather and canvas gloves. You can DIY this if you want to, but it’s really important to remember that it needs to be light colors. You’ve probably noticed that its always a white suit. That’s because the bees’ natural predators are all dark in color: black bears, raccoons, skunks. So they associate those dark colors with danger.

There are other accessories you will need, but this is all you need to start a hive with. You can email us if you have any specific questions you want me to write about. If you just want a quick response, go over to our Facebook and shoot us a message. Good Luck!