Building a Layens Beehive

Wow, I thought I would have never made a post about building beehives until the last year. I've always liked honey and bees but having my own colony of bees, let alone building my own beehives, wasn't something that I imagined to be doing anytime soon. But you never know. You starting researching a subject and then before you know it you are knee-deep into it. This is how it happened with my bees and beehives. Before going into the details of this post, let me share a short video of my bees to whet your appetite (I should have paid the nightingale singing in the background, which makes this short video much more loveable) :

 

There are many different types of beehives and beekeeping methods in the world. I am not expert to pitch one method over the other. But after having read the book called "Beekeeping With a Smile", I was hooked on deep horizontal hives. These hives are not a new invention, apparently a well-known French apiarist called Georges de Layens have made them popular at his time. But they were almost forgotten in favor of the Langstroth hive, which represents the current industrial standard. According to what I've learned from this book, however, Langstroth hives require much more attention from the beekeeper to keep the bees happy and productive. Furthermore, Langstroth hives do not resemble the large deep tree hollows that the bees have been accustomed to use as their homes for thousands of years. The Layens deep horizontal hives, on the other hand, are more representative of the bees' natural environment. As such they require less maintenance to keep the bees happy and healthy. The book is a must read in my opinion even you are not that into keeping bees. Who knows, may be you will be after reading it.

In any case, given that I am only a part-time farmer (even this is an exaggeration), who definitely doesn't have the time and energy that a Langstroth hive would require, I wanted to give a shot at building a Layens hive. By the way, there is a website called The Horizontal Hive, which sort of accompanies the book. The website is full of useful information and I definitely recommend visiting it if you want to build your own beehive. I've built mine by going back and forth between the book and the website. In this post, I would to document the process to provide further help to those who want to build their very own beehives and also to keep this is a reminder for myself if I want to build more hives in the future.

So without further ado let's get started. I should mention early on that the dimensions of my hive are not exactly the same as those that are described in the resources that I mentioned before. My size was somewhat enforced by the size of the lumber that I could find. But overall, the process below gives you big hives (you will definitely need a friend to carry them to their final destination) that captures the essence of Layens hives.

Hive Body

For the body, I've used rough lumber with dimensions 2 by 8 inches (5 by 20 cm). Here is a picture of it before they are cut:

From these I've cut the following sized items for the walls of the body:

• Four 27.5" (70 cm) boards
• Four 21.25" (54 cm) boards

I think these dimensions were dictated by the length of the original boards. Although I don't fully remember, it is quite possible that the original boards were 250 cm in length so I could get two of the 70 cm boards and two of the 54 cm boards from this one piece (70 + 70 + 54 + 54 = 248). I have them assembled these pieces as follows:

You can see that the longer pieces are sandwiched between the shorter pieces. This makes the long side of the hive about 31.5" (80 cm). The short side of the hive remains same as the size of the short boards (21.25" = 54 cm).

When assembling this body it is important to make a tongue and groove connection between the boards put on top of each other. This ensures that the connections are solid and there is minimal airgap between the connected boards. It looks like this:

There are two things to note here. One is the connection between the boards. Here is a closeup view of it:

This ensures a strong connection between the boards. This is done between the two long boards and the two short boards. Although you can make such joints between the long and short boards as well, it is a bit more complicated and the resources that I followed did not deem it necessary to do it. As such I've simply glued and screwed the long and short boards to each other. The tongue and groove connected boards were simply glued by pouring some wood glue to the groove part. No screws are used there.

The second thing to note is the top of the long boards. Note that some groove is cut there as well:

This will serve to hold the frames later on. So how do we make such cuts? These cuts are best done using a router and I happened to have one in my garage. I was pleased to put it into use for this project. So the finished body kind of looks like this (note that I've screw-glued another frame at the top which will later be used to hold the roof of the hive):

The overall dimensions of this box are: 31.5" x 21.25" x 15.35" (80 cm x 54 cm x 39 cm). The last dimension represents the height. It is 1 cm shorter than the sum of the boards (20 cm + 20 cm - 1cm = 39 cm) due to tongue-and-groove connection.

At this point I embarrassingly remember an important detail. One reason that I cut the short boards at 54 cm was that I wanted my hive to be compatible with standard Langstroth frames. As the long boards of the body overlap with the short boards, there is about 45 cm space left inside. With the grooves we cut on the top of the long boards (about 1.5 cm each), the top bar of a frame can be at most 48.5 cm. So any top-bar size between 45 and 48.5 cm will fit nicely into our hive. Actually the top-bar size for a Langstroth frame is about 47.5 - 48 cm, so it will fit into this opening. Here is a diagram:

Why is this necessary if we are not building a Langstroth hive? Assuming that you will buy your first colony from a local beekeeper who uses Langstroth hives and not catch a swarm yourself, you need a standard sized hive to  insert these frames to your own hive. Check this in your own region but here in Türkiye the top-bar of a Langstroth frame is about 47.5 - 48 cm (18.7 - 18.9"). This includes the overhang. The length without the overhang is 43.5 cm (12.12"). It kind of looks like this:

Note that Langstroth frames are shallower than the depth of our hive. I think they are about 23 cm in depth. But this is okay, the first few frames you get from the local beekeeper will have some extra space in the bottom. Usually, bees will continue making comb from the bottom of these frames. Although this extra space will not have sides and a bottom, this is generally not a problem (in fact there is a beekeeping system called Top-Bar Beekeeping which only uses a single top-bar in place of a regular frame with sides and bottom).

To summarize, I build the body as mentioned above. The frames that I build myself will have a depth of 35 cm (13.75"). But the body is compatible with the standard Langstroth frames, which is needed when you buy your initial frames with bees from a local beekeeper. The bees will draw comb at the bottom of these Langstroth frames so you will not use space.

As the depth of the body is 39 cm and we have about 1 cm further lost due to the groove to hold the frames, we have about 3 cm left (about 1.2") at the bottom of the hive if the depth of the frames are 35 cm. This space is small enough for bees not to draw comb but large enough for ventilation and ease of access between the frames. See this post on a related forum regarding the space between the bottom of the frames and the floor of the hive.

Speaking of the floor, I used a two 1" (about 2 cm) thick boards glued to each other and screw-glued them to the bottom of the body which we just constructed. Needless to say that you need to turn over the body to make this process possible. Once the floor is added, it is a good idea to add some insect-proof ventilation holes. Good air ventilation inside the hive is critical for bees for all seasons (including winter!):

As you will see in the following pictures the floor of the hive extends for about an inch from the front of the hive. This serves as a landing board for the bees. Although it is debatable whether bees need a landing board or not, having one definitely does not hurt them and no extra effort or material is used by doing it this way.

Hive Roof

Now that we have a decent body, we need to put a roof on it. For the roof all we need to do is building another box that sits snugly on the hive body. Remember the extrusions we added to the top of the body from the previous picture? The roof-box will sit on those.  The only thing that is special about the roof box is that it would be a good idea to make this slanted so when it rains the water slides down the edges -- just like the roof of a real house.

The dimensions of the roof box obviously depends on the dimensions of the hive body. So make sure to measure it once more before you start cutting the wood for the roof. In my case a box with a length of 80 cm (31.5") and width of 58 cm (22.8") would fit on the frame attached to the body (although the body width was 54 cm, you need to account for the thickness of the roof frame to decide on its final size). As for the height, I chose to go with 20 cm (8") at the front and 10 cm (4") at the back. Here is a sketch of what I am talking about:

Its constructed version is below:

By the way I built the roof from thinner wood. The body was made of two by stock (5 cm in thickness) whereas I made the roof from one by stock (about 2 cm in thickness). This is because the roof is a part of the hive which you may end up lifting to access your hive. Making it too heavy would certainly not make this process easier! You can nail/screw/glue the pieces to make the frame as shown above. After the roof-box is done, we need to cover it with some sort of cover. I had available tongue and groove boards from another project so I used them to cover the top:

With the roof done, it is a good idea to add some ventilation holes its both sides (three on each side each of which is about one inch in diameter). Here is a picture. Note that I added a metal screen to allow airflow while preventing insect flow:

In this picture you can also see that I added two beams to provide a sturdier support to the tongue-and-groove boards.

Legs

Now we that have a body and a roof, we can move on to adding some legs to lift our hive above the ground. How long the legs should be? I guess it depends on your height -- you should be at a comfortable position when tending to your bees. It should also lift the hive sufficiently above the ground to prevent critters like porcupines from accessing the entrance of the hive. The legs should be slanted towards outside for better balance. I used one by two stock (5 cm by 10 cm) for the legs. Here is a finished picture:

In this picture, we can also see an entrance slit that I opened in the bottom left corner. This slit is about 10 cm (4") in length and 1 cm (0.5") in height. I think it is about half an inch (1.5 cm) higher than the hive's floor. Remember that we had about 3 cm opening between the bottom of the frames and floor of the hive. If I had placed the opening higher, bees would directly be confronted with frames when they enter the hive. With this arrangement, bees can use the empty space underneath the frames for each in and out access. I must admit that I do not know if bees care about this little detail but it made sense to me doing it this way. Also note that I attached the legs just underneath the frame I made to support the roof. This way the roof is not only supported by this frame but also by the legs. I congratulated myself for thinking about this rather simple trick.

Putting it Altogether

Actually the previous picture already showed an assembled view of the final product. But here a few more details are shared to fully complete our little beehive. Well, firstly when combing the roof with the body it is a good idea to use hinges. This way, you can open the roof without fully lifting it and trying to find a place to put it on. Here is what I mean:

Of course, this requires using some hooks and durable ropes or chains to hold the roof in this position. The pictures below should give the idea:

 

Also we need add a waterproof layer on the top of the roof's cover to prevent elements from going in. I've used some corrugated plastic which I had in my garage laying around. You could use singles or metal sheets for this purpose. In any case, make sure that this layer extrudes out by some amount in all directions so that rain or snow cannot easily slide toward the hive. Here is the hive with the final layer of the roof on:

By the way, do not screw the final waterproof layer yet, as we will be painting the entire outside of the hive (never paint the inside of the hive!). For this purpose I used a good quality water-based paint. This is how it looks with the paint applied:

I think it looks like quite a nice home that if I were a bee I would have definitely wanted to settle in it.

The Frames

We already talked about the frames when we discussed the hive body. But I would like to mention a few more things in this part. Firstly, it would have been awesome if we could get all the pieces to assemble a frame from a local bee store. But because our hive does not conform to the Langstroth standards (to be sure, a Langstroth frame will nicely fit in our hive but there will be too much space left at the bottom), we need to build them ourselves as well. Building frames is not difficult but we need to pay attention to a few details. The top bar of the frame has a width of approximately 1.5" (3.8 cm). Its length is about 47.5 cm as mentioned earlier. You can consider the thickness to be about 0.75" or 2 cm. Now we need to cut an indent of about 0.75" (2 cm) from either side. We then nail-glue two vertical bars that rest on these indents. These bars have a length of 35 cm, again as discussed earlier. One important details about these vertical bars is that they must be cut in a way that allows them to touch each other at the top part but have a space between them afterwards. This is called a self-spacing frame. It allows you to stack the frames tightly on the top but have room for bees to travel between the frames in the middle and the bottom. The picture below explains it better than I can with words:

Note that although the top bar of the frames touch each other, there is a bee space between the frames along most of the way down. I found by trial and error that this kind of cut is best achieved with a jigsaw.

After the vertical bars are cut and attached to the top bar, the bottom bar is the easiest part. We simply need to cut a bar of about 43.5 cm (12.12") and attach it flush to the end of the vertical bars. And that is it -- we just need to make as many frames as our hive takes, which is about 16 or 17 and then put it into our hive.

Conclusion

Successfully keeping bees in an environment that is most natural to them is a difficult endeavor. In this post, I tried to share what I learned from several excellent resources on beekeeping to build a hive that resembles such an environment. I adapted their plans according to my own situation and successfully managed to build something similar to a Layens hive. Here, I outlined what I learned during the process in case this encourages someone else to build his or her own hives. Let me conclude this post with a picture of my hive in its final destination in the woods:

 

Thanks for reading this post till the very end!