Tag Archives: Warre Beehives

Adapter to allow inserting a warre frame into a langstroth hive
Jul 23 2012

Easy way to shift Warre top bars to a Langstroth Nuc

Though there are many positive aspects to Abbé Émile Warré (1867-1951) beehive design, one of the drawbacks is the incompatibility between it and other hive systems. As I’m learning more and more about starting splits, queen rearing and using nucs in the classes offered by West Sound Beekeepers Association I’m seeing how much of a hassle it is to work between Warre and Langstroth hives.

In this particular case I wanted to start a split using several frames of brood and pollen and several frames of honey. Typically you would take these from one or more strong hives and just move the frames into a nuc, however the Warre bars are quite a bit shorter than the Langstroth nuc…so what to do….what to do?

Adapter to allow inserting a warre frame into a langstroth hive

Warre frame adapter

One option is to build an adaptor. This will allow you to slide the smaller Warre bar with its comb into a frame that will then fit into a Langstroth nuc. Fortunately for me I have a friend/fellow beekeeper who is a master wood worker. Darren, House of Bees.com, built a slick frame that allows just that. You can see to the side what it looks like.

Another option is one I devised on the fly before Darren proposed his Warre adapter. Simply take the top bar of aLangstroth frame and

Zip ties to connect warre top bar to a langstroth beehive frame

Zip ties used to attach larger langstroth bar to a warre topbar

beekeeping warre bee hives
zip tie connecting the two bars

lay it along the top of the Warre bar. Run two zip ties through the comb and around cinching the two top bars together. Then simply hang the combination into your nuc or other Langstroth hive. As you can see in the photo the bees are more than happy to fill in the space.

The big difference between the two approaches is that Darrens adaptor can easily be undone if you wanted to move the Warre bar back into a Warre box. My zip tie method would be a little messier.

Honey comb, Warre beehive, Langstroth bee hives

Bees have filled in the space around the warre topbar

 

Mar 25 2012

Setting up the hives for our new arrivals…in a couple of loooong weeks.

With the weather beeeing so nice I’m hoping that this will mean we will indeed get our bees as scheduled, the first Saturday in April. My guess is that it has to do more with what is happening in California which is where the bee packages are coming from.

As promised in my last post here are some pictures showing how I placed the hives and how they turned out. If you ask 10 different beekeepers how to build a base you will come up with 10 different answers. Right or wrong here is how I did it for my first time.

These hives have the entrances facing south and are in full sun most of the day.

I have screened baseboards….if I didn’t I might want to have the hive lean a little toward the hive entrance so that condensation would have an easy way out of the hive.