A Home for Honeybees

Ever since I was nine years old, I want to have honey bees. I wanted to have fresh honey that I could say I helped make. I wanted to contribute to the garden and flowers in a positive way that let nature do it's thing and I get to witness. I wanted to be a beekeeper.

After twenty years, I finally got my bees!

I joined my local beekeepers club. They are all over and at the state level too, so if you are interested look for your local group. Through the club my nine year old daughter and I took bee keeping classes together, she may have been the youngest in our class but one of the most attentive. There is something wonderful about sharing a passion or learning a new skill with your child. 

Now I gained the knowledge to keep them alive and they were on their way here I needed to have a hive to put them in. After lots of research I decided to use a Langstroth hive which is one of the most common and does well in our climate. 

The Langstroth hive is a box that holds frames and the boxes are stacked to form the hive that is adjustable for that bees needs.  The boxes come in either ten or eight frames wide, and depths of shallow, medium, and deep. 

I chose eight frame mediums for our hive because the weight of the boxes (wooden frames, bees, comb, honey, larva) can get to 40 pounds in the eight frame mediums, and 50 or more pounds in a ten frame, and deeps are heavier still! Shallows did not seem to be as efficient as the mediums for our needs. 

One morning my Love and I sat at the kitchen table and put our hives together. 

Paint is only to weather protect the hive so I only painted the outside. There are several reasons not to paint the inside of the hive:

*The fumes (even no and low VOC paint have fumes the the bees smell) effect the bees communication inside the hive

*The bees may decide that they will not live n a hive that has a paint smell and will leave

*In the heat the paint can make the boxes stick together and cause a problem during hive checks

Unpainted wood can breath and help control moisture inside the hive

*In nature bees build hives in hollow logs that don't have paint

Just to name a few.

I painted my hives a light purple because, well the bees don't really care and I do :)

Sweetness with the hives the day before the bees arrived.

Bees don't see color the same way the we do so I did keep that in mind when choosing the color. I used a pastel base NO VOC paint in a light purple, I wanted the paint to reflect some of the heat so the bees wouldn't get to hot in the summer. Bees can't see red or they see it as black and don't go to red flowers but they can see some more blue purples. Purple makes me happy and from what I read they will be able to see this shade enough to get home, so I have purple hives :)

I am becoming a beekeeper; it is a childhood dream coming true that I get to share with my children!