Our Go-To Hive Setup

There’s a running joke in this industry: ask ten beekeepers a question, and you’ll get eleven different answers. When it comes to hive equipment, there are endless ways to set up a colony, and what works beautifully in one climate might not make sense in another.

We aren't here to say our way is the only right way, but after dialing in our operations across our yards, we’ve found a specific rhythm that keeps our bees healthy and our backs from aching. Here is a look at the equipment we use and the reasoning behind our setup.

Double Deep Brood Boxes

For the core of the hive—the brood chamber where the queen lays her eggs and the colony raises its young—we run double deeps.

Running two deep boxes gives the queen plenty of real estate to build up a massive, strong workforce in the spring, while still leaving enough room for the colony to pack away the heavy honey and pollen reserves they need to survive the colder months. It’s all about giving them the space to manage their own survival.

Medium Supers

When it’s time to add boxes for the honey harvest (the supers), we switch to mediums. The reason for this is incredibly simple: gravity. A deep box fully loaded with honey can easily tip the scales at 80 to 90 pounds. When you are lifting, stacking, and loading those boxes onto a trailer, those deeps take a heavy toll. Medium supers, when full, usually sit right around a much more manageable 40 to 50 pounds. It makes the physical labor of harvesting much smoother and safer.

The 9-Frame Trick (in a 10-Frame Box)

If you peek inside our medium honey supers, you’ll notice something specific: we only run nine frames inside a ten-frame box. We space the nine frames out evenly, which leaves a little extra gap between each one. Because bees naturally want to fill that space, they will draw the wax comb out just a bit further than the wooden edges of the frame to maintain their standard "bee space." Why do we want fatter comb? It makes extraction incredibly efficient. When it’s time to uncap the honey in the honey house, the knife glides straight across the thick, protruding comb in one clean slice, rather than having to dig down between the wooden edges.

Every beekeeping operation has its own unique footprint, but this setup has proven to be the most efficient for our yards and our bees!