Skep hives are traditional hives that have been used for hundreds of years.
Top Bar Hives are designed for the ease of the bees, not the beekeeper. The design is much more conducive to their natural instincts, where as Langstroth Hives are more conducive to collecting honey so more often the choice for farmers and country folk looking to harvest honey.
Hives are built on a stand, to keep hives off the ground.
The next part is a Bottom Board, basically the entrance in and out of the hive. This is where many beekeeper put a screen to reduce hive exposure to mites. As a bee flies into the entrance the mites fall off and drop through the screen and are unable to get into the hive. This is a very good line of defense.
The larger box on the bottom of the hive is called a Brood Super, this is where the Queen resides and lays the eggs, the brood. A natural bees instinct is protect the brood so many worker bees stay in this compartment to attend the queen and the brood. Since the queen lays eggs in the same honey comb that the nectar is made into honey, a beekeeper needs to make sure the frames they are collecting are filled with honey and not babies. So the next layer is a "Queen Excluder", this screen allows the worker bees access but not the Queen. This limits the queen to the bottom chamber. There is enough room in this chamber for eggs, larvae and honey for winter for the whole colony. The Brooder Super is not harvested and left for the bees to use over winter.
On top of the Queen Excluder are Honey Supers. These are half-size boxes that have honey comb frames. This is where worker bees move the honey to when the bottom Brooder Super gets to full. A bee keeper can have two, three, four or more Honey supers on each hive. Usually you will only see one or two depending how productive a hive is.
On top of these layers you will find a hive inner cover and then a top cover. In a hive bees create a lovely super strong "bee caulking" that makes their hives weather tight. The inner layer keeps the bees from 'caulking' the top cover. If the top cover was ever sealed it would be extremely, extremely hard for a bee keeper to open, which would disturb the bees.
In this picture you can see our instructor had taken off the top cover and the inner cover. There are two Honey Supers on this hive and one Brooder Super. He has 6 hives currently, at one time he had 25. While standing in the hive yard, discussing the hives there were literally thousands of bees buzzing all around us. It was fascinating. The bees were not concerned with us at all, they just kept flying by like we weren't even there. No one else had protective gear but him because he has an allergy and he has been keeping bees for 15 years.
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