Longhive (Horizontal Hive). 8-Frame Compatible

Using  our decades of longhive beekeeping experience, we have redesigned our longhive to make it more protective, easier to manage, and better looking:

Shorter:  Experience has shown us that our 10-frame compatible longhive is needlessly large. The brood chamber is never completely filled with brood, due to the colony using the super space for honey storage.  So we have "rightsized" our latest longhive to be shorter, making it easier to manage.  It is 8-frame compatible, allows for 17 frames of brood, and encourages the colony to store honey in the 8-frame supers.  Essentially, it is a single-brood-chamber hive that accomodates pairs of 8-frame honey supers above, separated with a queen excluder.  The excluder confines the queen to lay in the main brood chamber, which encourages the workers to place their honey stores above the brood chamber in the supers.   As the nectar flow declines in the autumn, the colony backfills the brood nest with winter stores. 

Protective Entrance:  Protruding landing boards are vulnerable to bad weather and encourage robbing.  Our new longhive design has a recessed landing board, which protects from bad weather and reduces robbing. This robbing protection is further increased by the deep entrance reducer that forces robbers into a three inch tunnel, which guard-bees can more easily protect. This deep entrance reducer also places the actual entrance deeper into the hive, making it harder for the robbers to sneak in at the front entrance unnoticed.   

Brood Chamber Accommodates Vaporizing:  A common complaint about oxalic vaporizing is accidental burning of the frames.  Our Longhive has plenty  of space below the frames to reduce this risk.  Additionally, the front has a tall 13/16" height, making easy access for the vaporizing probe.  

Compatibility: Our new Longhive is entirely compatible with Langstroth hive components and equipment, such as frames feeders, and screens.  Its horizontal format allows both Kenya Topbar and Langstroth style beekeeping.

Thermal Protection:  Its double wall structure gives it great strength and thermal mass to reduce temperature fluctuations. The optional Vivaldi Boards enable top insulation.  Additionally, divider boards can accommodate internal side insulation.   insulation.  Price does not include frames.

Free ebook on longhives: Comes with free e-book on longhive beekeeping.

Why Longhives? Longhives eliminate the need for heavy lifting once everything is installed.  All frame manipulation is done at bench height, and there is no need to lift hive boxes to inspect your frames. Better still, you can easily assess the complete hive population at a glance; all you have to do is lift the lid to get an instant intuitive sense of the hive without lifting any boxes. 

Flexibility is another key attribute of the longhive. With the help of the included divider board, you can easily split the colony.  With additional dividers, you can make multiple nucs so it becomes a condominium hive.