Accessories

Beehives have been around for centuries in different shapes, designs and sizes. It wasn’t until the Langstroth design that the beehive actually became standardised. There are still many different types of beehives in use across the world.

The mainstream beehive designs used in South Africa are the Langstroth beehive & Bee Bunka hive. The Langstroth Beehive hasn’t been changed much since its first inception in the 1800s. Small changes have been made do incorporate aluminium covers, the type of weather protection used on the wood and the use of a queen excluder to prevent egg-laying in the super chamber.

The beehive made beekeeping manageable as before the advent of the beehive, bee colonies would be raided for their golden liquid and usually, the colony would be destroyed in the process. This created the need for a manageable method to keep bees, transport them and harvest honey from them without causing damage or destruction to the bee colony.

Find out more about beehives…

Queen Excluders

The queen excluder keeps the queen bee from laying eggs in the Langstroth super chamber or shallow box, where the honey is stored. Without the queen excluder, the honeycomb would be mixed with brood, eggs and larvae and very difficult to harvest and filter.

Queen Excluders were an excellent modification to the existing Langstroth beehive design.

Before the invention of queen bee excluders, managing the honeycomb became complicated as the queen would lay eggs all over the beehive causing the honey to be mixed with brood and larvae.

The benefit of using a queen bee excluder is that your honey is kept separate from the eggs, larvae and brood and can be easily removed, filtered and bottled. The brood remains intact and unharmed during the entire process.

Queen bee excluders also have indirect uses such as preventing a colony from absconding, hiving a new colony and queen rearing.

A Langstroth hive is synonymous with a queen excluder. They go hand in hand.

Wax Sheets

The wax foundation sheets provide the honey bee with a foundation of same size shaped comb as they would build themselves using a mould.

Without the wax foundation sheet, absolutely NOTHING would change inside the hive as bees were building wax comb since long before we discovered honey!

Wax foundation sheets or even wax starter strips do assist in attracting honey bee scouts to a potential catch box or an empty beehive. The scent is picked up during the heat of the day as the internal temperature of the beehive heats up and causes beeswax scent to emanate from the hive.

Beeswax sheets can also be used to roll beeswax candles. This is quite expensive and beeswax is extremely hard to come by let alone be used in a situation where it cannot be recyclable. Beekeepers are reluctant to have pure beeswax leave the industry for use as beeswax candles or otherwise.

Wire Rolls

The bee frame wire helps support the honeycomb and brood inside the hive on the frame.

Generally, a superframe can weigh up to 4Kg when a full honey flow occurs and therefore frame wire is helpful to ensure it doesn’t break under stress when being harvested.

The Frame Wire ensures that support is provided to the honeycomb on the frame. Usually, a Langstroth hive has 2 frame wire supports running across a superframe and 4 running across a brood frame.

These frame wires do require maintenance over time and so keeping a roll of frame wire handy is an excellent idea. We provide frame wire rolls in 1KG format which is the black one indicated to the left.

We are happy to post a frame wire roll to any location in South Africa on arrangement.