Warre Hives - Learn About Warre Hives (2024)

FAQs

Warre Hives - Learn About Warre Hives? ›

A Warre hive is a vertical top bar hive that uses bars instead of frames, usually with a wooden wedge or guide on the bars from which the bees build their own comb, just like they do in nature. The Warre (pronounced: WAR-ray) hive is named after its inventor, French monk Abbé Émile Warré.

Warre hives are ideally suited for the beekeeper looking for a low-cost, low-maintenance hive design. In our mind the Warre hive is the ultimate design for natural, chemical-free beekeeping, and we've had tremendous success with our own Warres with little to no maintenance.

Warre hives are meant to be expanded with the nadiring practice, by adding empty boxes to the bottom of the hive. The bees will generally build from the top down, and as their bottom most box becomes 80% full, an empty box can be added underneath. Then, excess honey will be harvested off the top of the hive.

Warre Beehives

It has wooden slats similar to that of the top-bar hive, but it stacks vertically much like a Langstroth hive. However, you add new boxes to the bottom of the hive rather than the top. The idea here is to allow bees to work and build from the top down as they do in nature.

The Warre hive (pronounced war-ray) is a vertical box system similar to the Langstroth, but features removable top bars instead of frames and utilizes square boxes instead of rectangular boxes.

The main disadvantage of Hive could be its initial cost of purchase and installation. Although it can lead to savings on energy bills over time, the upfront investment can be significant.

In the photo below, you can see how much honey comes from just one Warré hive body (about 10 quarts or 25-27lbs.). In most areas, carefully managed hives could easily yield two or three boxes each season.

Our goal is to provide the bees with a good environment in which they can thrive mostly on their own. In our opinion, the best environment is a hive with natural comb such as a top bar hive, Warré hive, or a foundationless Langstroth hive.

The Langstroth hive (pictured below) is the most common style in use today and a favorite for new beekeepers. Rev. Lorenzo Langstroth patented the design in the mid-19th century. It features removable frames that the bees build comb in.

What is the history of the Warre hive? ›

History of Warre Hives

Abbe Emile Warre developed the Warre hive over 50 years of research, culminating in what he liked to call “The People's Hive” in the early 1950s. He studied over 300 hive designs, ranging from straw skeps to the modern Langstroth hive, analyzing their ease of use and suitability for honey bees.

Warre beehives are foundationless. They use bars that lay across the top of each box, from which bees will draw their own comb. By the way, while it is perfectly possible to use foundationless frames in the Langstroth – and quite common – it wasn't specifically designed with that approach in mind, unlike the Warre.

The Warré hive has several important features that set it apart from other beehives. These include: Square hive bodies with internal dimensions of 300mm (about 11 and 13/16") and a height of 210mm (about 8 1/4”). Conventional Warré hives do not use frames; only affixed top bars (8 per box).

Requires less maintenance: Warré hives are designed to be low maintenance and require less frequent inspections and manipulations compared to Langstroth hives. Natural beekeeping: Warré hives are designed to allow bees to build their comb naturally without the use of pre-fabricated foundation sheets or frames.

The Smith hive's compact size makes the bees' task of warming the hive in the winter much easier. This means healthier and better-rested bees in the spring. The small size, also, has another advantage to Scottish beekeepers.

Flow Hives are bad for bees

Critics have raised concerns that the Flow system might tempt beekeepers to harvest honey too frequently, leaving the bees short of their own food supply.

Advantages of the frame hive

a) The comb is fixed firmly to the four sides of the frame. This facilitates easy harvesting, and the beekeeper has little fear of damaging the comb. b) The strength of the built-in comb also allows easy transportation, even over bad roads.