Eco Beehive system of beekeeping

 The hive is derived from what I have observed in the wild and tested: what bees like, look for, and change their hive space into. Because of this, it is completely useless as a conventional beehive, but it is perfect for what creates happy, healthy honey bees and ecosystems. 

Honey can be taken, if you wish, with minimal impact on the colony. It has no impact on their ability to overwinter, only on their spring start-up. The most vulnerable time for honey bees is when they swarm and their ability to judge how to negotiate overwintering.

This system has no impact on these two vulnerabilities and is the only system that uses this approach: the Eco BeeHive honey harvesting system, developed by me, Kevin Hancock.

The system is designed to work with honey bees and other bugs as an ecosystem.
It was developed from quiet observation and testing.

Nowhere in nature, in a natural environment, do you ever find honey bee hives in an apiary system — not ever — and yet this is taught as the way things are done.
Sorry, that is just a pet gripe.

OK, so there are a two aspects to this:
hive management and hive placement.

Even Poe Bear knows bees have beehives in trees not in Boxes

 I have inspected and followed hundreds of wild colonies. I have kept bees using most conventional methods: Top Bar hives, framed box hives, and Warré hives. 

 And in the end, I have two hives: one for temperate areas like England, and one for colder areas like Scotland and higher parts of Europe. 

 The roof is a non-ventilated roof, unlike a Warré hive. It has enough thermal insulation to act as though there were an entire tree above the beehive. (Bees live in beehives, not nests.) 

The hive is 30 mm or more thick and is made of pine with a high resin content, giving it excellent thermal properties. It holds about 46 liters and is arranged in a tall vertical column with small holes that can be defended.

One of the most vulnerable times is just after swarming, when the hive does not have a laying queen and the colony has halved in size. This shape allows bees to stay close to the entrances, while in winter, as heat rises, they have enough distance from the cold outside but remain snug enough to stay viable.

In the bottom of every tree hive is a myriad of bugs, mycelium, and other organisms. This is very much part of the bees’ system for staying healthy.

For instance, the Warré hive tries to remove moisture through the roof — this is never observed in nature. In nature, what you see is that bees set up the mycelium in the bottom. In winter it dies and becomes insulation. In summer it becomes a sponge and literally sucks the condensation out of the hive. It also provides a place for other beneficial bugs to live, such as mites, spiders, and earwigs.

This hive is set at 600 mm off the ground as a minimum. This provides the minimum distance for natural hive adoption. In an allotment, it can be placed on a stick so the bees fly over people.

So this is a very basic idea of how it works, and that is all you need to know, but if you want to tinker or DIY You need to Know a little more,, do consider my online course..

This covers history of most all parts for better understanding to not make the same mistakes as me over again. and give you the DIY to build your own..

So there is an area in a hive I call the transitional area. loads of realy interesting things happen here. it is an area that is used for honey as well as brood. abouve this is just honey and bellow is just brood.

After quite a few years and hundreds of experiments, I have come up with what is essentially my NOOK AND CRANNY honey harvesting system.

Basically, if you add a small space to the transitional area of a hive, the bees will treat it like the mantle around the brood area. The mantle around the brood area is where they store food for the brood and prepare food for the brood.

But here is the cool part: if you have just the right size, shape, location, and access space, the bees will put only honey into this space — with no queen excluder.

And the coolest part is that in winter, when they start to feed, they will leave this honey behind and never use it through winter, only returning to it again in spring — sometimes.

So now you can add a space with out creating stress to the hive. you can take honey with 0% inmpact on their abuility to over winter. You only have to visit the hive once a year, or twice if you use a bee-door.

So you put the HONEY BOX ON in spring, and this is a honeybox not a super.

then you take it off in autum and cut the combe out,  sweep the bees into another honeybox and replace that on the hive.

you will need special tool I created to do this.

OR

You can take the honey box off and place a bee door between the hive and the honey box. Come back a week later and you can remove the honey box with no bees inside.

This way, you can use just a box, or a box with cubes in. Then remove the bee door and install another honey box or a blank.

The bee door is basically a door fitted with bee escapes, allowing bees to leave but not return.