crispin jackson
New Bee
Let me speculate, then you can respond with clarifications. Speculation is always a path of thinking, and i'll do my best to give clear answers
The primary advantage of a long hive is that access to the combs does not involve removing a stack of boxes first. The area of combs accessed can be selected so that the brood nest is minimally disrupted. Bees naturally tend to keep the brood nest between the entrance and the storage area for honey. This makes it simple with a long hive to remove frames at the back for honey removal.
I wouldn't say that's a primary advantage to be honest, although its a main advantage certainly. The unobtrusive methods to examine a hive are beneficial to both bees and beekeepers. A vertical aligned hive tends to require the whole colony exposed to light, air and cooling (once a lid or upper super is removed the whole colony reacts). The alignment you are referring to is only with hives that have the entrance on the short end and not along the length. This is believe is very much the correct alignment and a 'closed alignment' as Bernhard Clauss referred to it has advantages to the bees ability to maintain the air around their brood chamber. less active movement of air through a brood chamber allows bees to move air as they require, as opposed to loosing warm brood air with air flowing over it.
The orientation of entrance, brood, honey, unripe nectar, empty frames at the back does indeed simplify harvesting and brood chamber management.
The biggest disadvantage of a long hive is that it can't be expanded very easily. This puts the beekeeper at a disadvantage in areas with heavy honey flows. With Langstroth or similar equipment, a honey super can be stacked on top as long as the bees need the space. With a long hive, it has to be built large enough for the bee it houses and the area where it is used.
Id agree that the limitation in size makes a horizontal hive slightly more complicated to work and that the increased volume of adding supers in heavy flows is simple, but i dont find this to be a major problem in heavy flows. We kept alot of bees on the Aloe greatheadii var. davyana and kidneybeans as nectar sources, with the davyana being a spectacularly heavy nectar and pollen flow. Not being able to 'super-up' never limited our honey production in the JHH (I used Langstroths and JHH together). It required more active management and we would sometimes have 5-8 deep frames of nectar being ripened and not harvested, but removing 10 deep frames at a harvest meant that we effectively added 2 supers of space at a time.
Importantly with the aloe davyana was the way the queens laid and the ramping up of brood production. Davyana is possibly the heaviest pollen and nectar flow combined in South Africa and happens in the winter, so having a continuous chamber where the queen was able to expand her brood chamber to match the available resources meant that we got very strong swarms fast with the JHH and it took a while longer for the Langstroths to react. this lead to greater overall harvesting from JHH in heavy flows.
Collection of honey has to be done one frame at a time. This compares with blowing bees out of a super of honey on a Langstroth hive and carrying the entire super to the truck for extraction. This "one frame at a time" method of operation is common in all variants of long hives I've seen including the Layens, various Ukrainian chest type hives, etc. This results in a significant increase in labor needed at the beehive as compared to hives with removable honey supers.
I dont find one frame at a time to be that much slower than super removal, and i do find it more precise in harvesting capped honey, but it did take me a few years to be proficient and quick with it. A supported frame speeds the process up, but in some beekeeping Ive doen we didn’t have electricity and thus crushed comb for honey extraction. Being in the tropics this was not detrimental to bees as their wax replacement was fast. We cut combs directly into rollable drums (easier to move and crushed most comb without the need of presses) and this was by far the fastest honey removal ive done. A frame at a time is perhaps slower overall, but by removing deep frames with 2,5kg per frame, taking 10 frames doesn’t take that much longer than lifting a super and removing bees from the frames.
One special limit for top bar hives is that they are easily damaged if extracted. Special handling methods can be devised to deal with this issue. Since your hive uses dowels to form a frame, extraction will be easier, but still an issue given that the combs will be relatively fragile.
agreed, and the primary limitation I find with top bars which don’t have a supported frame is the care in handling them. I am fast and sure with how to handle top bars, but thats years of practice (no less than a beekeeper removing a langstroth super I guess) but I agree the unsupported frame of a TBH is a limitation. We used frames and top bars (depending on the area of operation and what was available to make frames or not. I had 1500 JHH in Mozambique for example and they only had top bars as we couldn't manufacture the dowelling). A supported frame is advantageous in both extraction (if centrifuging) and in the speed of handling a frame. But the fragile frames are generally limited to new comb and honey production, manipulating a brood frame that is unsupported is relatively sturdy, so long as you handle it with a little care.
Use of starter strips or guide combs is required to get straight combs. Once several combs have been drawn straight, they can be used as guides to get more combs drawn correctly.
Straight combs are of importance in all hive designs, and more so in unsupported hives like top bars. Using starter strips or half brood sheets supplied wax and gets the bees on the right track. Of more importance to starter strips or foundation for straight comb building is good quality frames and straight top bars of the correct width according to the strain of bee you are working with.
Long hives have advantages in winter. The brood nest tends to be near the entrance. As bees consume honey over winter, they move toward the back of the long hive consuming honey as they move. When fresh nectar is available, they reverse and backfill the combs as the brood nest relocates near the entrance. This was written about extensively by Quinby 150 years ago.
This is a thing my father and I refer to as ‘breathing of a brood chamber’ with the expansion or contraction of a brood chamber being related to the resources the bees manage to find. High pollen or nectar and the queen increases laying, the brood chamber swell (breathes out) or contracts in lesser periods. The movement of a brood chamber depending on where food is stored is of importance (I would imagine) in cold climates, but isn’t something I have that much experience of. We tended to locate from one honey flow to another, keeping the bees in near constant honey production. In Mozambique and Zimbabwe we had static hives and the expansion or contraction of the brood chamber was far more evident.
There are advantages in terms of colony cohesion because the bees align properly in a long hive. Think of it as Entrance, Brood Nest, and Honey Storage. They are in line with foraging bees coming in the entrance and giving up their nectar load in the brood nest. House bees then process the nectar pushing excess moisture out the entrance. Once the nectar is sufficiently concentrated, house bees move it to the storage area at the back of the brood nest. This sets up an efficient flow of foragers bringing in honey and house bees processing it into honey stores. The result is that foragers tend to stay near the entrance and house bees tend to stay in the honey storage area. Both groups of bees have regular contact with the brood nest and therefore are exposed to queen pheromones.
A cohesive cluster of bees has a number of advantages. I am not sure how familiar you are with A.M Capensis, or ‘cape laying worker’, but a simple version is that a cohesive cluster represses the need for laying worker to start production. This is of immense significance to beekeeping in South Africa, and possible other areas where laying worker is found.
The concept you are referring to within the hive we spend a while studying and planning. That being what a field worker does and how to have the least impact on the rest of the hive before returning to forage. We designed the frame to have ‘bee space’ around the sides and under the frames. This allows bees to travel around the brood chamber without having to go through it to reach the honey storage areas and we observed that field workers will move to the honey storage area to unload to house bees and leave quicker when this was the case. We actually consulted a ‘traffic engineer’ at my university and followed his advice that heavily laden trucks should circumvent a city centre rather than drive through it.
An advantage of long hives is that the beekeeper can move the brood nest if needed. This allows the beekeeper to maintain control of position of the brood nest which should be placed near the entrance. Moving the brood nest can be an advantage in areas with sharp transitions from winter to spring.
Brood chamber management was always a complicated thing for me with Langstroth. The use of bees brooding in cells leaves behind their chrysalis and after a period the cells start getting restricted, stunting bees and eventually exhausted of their use for brooding, so bees store honey in them. This often leads a queen to move upwards in a langstroth. With long hives the process is simplified in that the queen is never ‘honey bound’ and can move backwards in the hive. Thus if I ever encounter brood after the 11 or 12 frame from the entrance I simply remove the first three or four frames, shift the brood chamber forward and refill with new frames at the back. This maintains the cohesiveness of the brood chamber, clears out old wax and gives more space for honey production at the back. It really simplifies the management of a brood box. I am afraid I base my experience of tropical and sub tropical African bees, I am not used to working with temperate climates like you refer to, and this may well be a large difference in what we are both saying.
A disadvantage of long hives is that swarm control is limited to splitting and removing queen cells. One of those little tricks you learn if you keep bees in long hives long enough is that empty combs and/or empty bars ready to be drawn can be rotated next to the entrance as a cluster area for foragers. This can help a bit with preventing swarming.
Swarming with tropical bees is often and common. Its not something we try control to any large degree. We simply capture the splits and start new hives. While I know that leads to a short term loss of production and a mixture of genetic diversity (not knowing which queens you have etc) I have always found that to be a good thing We always have 10-20 trap hives within flight distance of an apiary to capture wild swarms or splits from our own hives.
Long hives have significant advantages in low input sustainable agriculture because the cost is low and the potential for profitable production is relatively high.
Since the major concern with your long hive is figuring out how big to make it, may I suggest looking at the Perrone hive which was designed for minimalist agriculture conditions. It is about double the size of the Jackson long hive. In the right conditions, the Perrone hive can be highly productive and requires minimum labour input.
I will definitely look up that hive, thanks for the suggestion. We did make some 40 frame hives, but had negative results more than positive results. There was a distinct thought process in choosing the volume of the hive we have and having 25 frames (10 brood frames and 15 deep honey frames) and we found that this was pretty close to optimal for a compromise with the bees having a small enough volume to maintain themselves and large enough that we did not have to harvest too often.
thanks for the insights
ive given my 2 c in blue above.
Last edited:
welcome to the forum Crispin, it's good having people with your experience on board.
