A Beehive is More Than Just Stacked Boxes?

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We get a lot of people asking about the gear we use out in the bee yards. When you look at a hive, it just looks like a stack of painted wooden boxes. But every single box, and even the number of frames we put inside them, is a deliberate choice to keep the bees healthy and make extraction a whole lot easier.

Here is a quick look at how we actually run our hives at the farm, and the reasons behind

it.

Double Deeps for the Brood

The bottom of the hive is the queen’s domain. This is where she lays eggs and the colony raises the next generation of workers. For this section, we use "deep" boxes, which are the largest, heaviest boxes we have.

We always run double deeps, meaning every colony gets two of these big boxes stacked on top of each other for their main living space. There are two main reasons we do this.

First, it’s about winter survival. Our winters up here can be brutal and unpredictable. A colony needs a massive amount of honey stored directly above them to make it through the cold months without starving. That second deep box gives them the exact real estate they need to pack away heavy winter reserves. Second, a prolific queen needs room to run in the spring. If she has two full boxes to expand her brood nest, the hive doesn't feel overcrowded too quickly. That extra breathing room naturally helps keep them from wanting to swarm.

Medium Supers for the Honey

Once the bottom two deep boxes are established, we start stacking the honey boxes on top, which are called supers. These are the boxes where the bees store the excess honey that we eventually harvest and bottle. For honey, we exclusively run medium supers. They are noticeably shorter than the deep boxes underneath them, and that comes down to a practical reality: weight. A deep box packed solid with honey can easily weigh 80 pounds or more. Lifting dozens of those a day in the summer heat will absolutely ruin your back. A medium super full of honey tops out around 50 to 60 pounds. It’s still heavy, but it’s manageable enough that we can work efficiently across the entire yard without breaking down.

The Nine-Frame Trick

If you open up one of our honey supers, it looks like we forgot how to count. The boxes are built to hold ten frames of comb. But we intentionally only put nine frames inside a ten-frame box. We space those nine frames out evenly, leaving a slightly wider gap between each one. When the bees see that extra open space, their instincts tell them to fill it. Instead of drawing the wax comb out flat and flush with the wooden edges of the frame, they pull the wax cells out much wider and deeper to close the gap.

This creates what we call "fat comb," and it gives us a huge advantage during harvest: more honey: deeper cells mean the bees can pack way more honey into a single frame,

easy cutting: when it’s time to extract, we use a heated knife to slice the wax caps off the comb before spinning it. Because the comb sticks out past the wooden edges of the frame, the knife glides right through in one clean pass without getting hung up on the wood, and

 reusable comb: slicing fat comb leaves the main wax blueprint completely intact. Once the honey is spun out, we can give those empty, undamaged frames right back to the bees. They don’t have to waste time rebuilding the wax from scratch; they can start refilling it with fresh nectar that same afternoon.

Every choice we make with our equipment is about working with the bees’ natural behavior to get the best product possible.

Right now, we are running an online moving sale on our 1-lb. bottles to clear the shelves before the heavy summer harvest rolls in. You can jump on our website and check out our local raw honey at kimptonshoneyfarms.com, or come grab it directly from the Preston’s Farmers Market in Franklin this Saturday, July 11th!