My first Layens hive (horizontal beekeeping)
Winter is time for organizing bee equipment and ordering supplies.
You can’t learn about natural beekeeping without learning about horizontal hives. Horizontal hives surface in apiaries as custom horizontal hives made with a beekeeper’s repurposed deeps or mediums, a top bar hive, or a Layens hive.
The beekeeping world calls the common hive style most people see, the vertical stacked boxes, a Langstroth hive. The creator of that hive style was L. L. Langstroth. He designed a hive that allowed beekeepers to remove frames without the need to destroy the colony’s comb for honey harvest (the old practice that was generally the only option). Just as Langstroth had a hive style namesake, Georges de Layens created a hive with removable frames as well. Layens’ hive design doesn’t allow the bees to build their colonies upward. Instead, a Layens mimics a fallen tree cavity and encourages colonies to build horizontally.
A horizontal hive helps bees build their colonies more aligned to the ways they would in the wild. Since the hive space is fixed, once the colony gets to a certain size, they’ll feel more inclined to swarm since they’ve run out of space. Vertical colonies can keep growing taller and taller, only limited by the queen’s egg-laying, the workers’ honey productions, and the beekeeper’s supplies (and ladder height). A Layens hive creates swarm-friendly circumstances, which can help beekeepers in a few ways.
Benefits of encouraging swarms
Natural beekeeping often implies that there is little-to-no intervention and/or a beekeeper manages hives without synthetic chemicals. Our world lacks a singular, legal definition of “natural beekeeping”, so when I speak at beekeeping clubs and conferences, I often describe it as a buffet. We have a long table full of options for managing hives in natural ways, but we may not care for everything on the table, might not have an appetite or taste for some things yet, and we can’t fit everything on our plate.
A swarm is a sign of a healthy colony and it’s how a colony reproduces. Swarming is even better if you have swarm traps set up, but that’s a topic for another time. The main benefit of swarms is a brood break, which helps to manage varroa mite populations. When a colony swarms, the queen leaves. The remaining workers need to create a new queen, which takes 18 days from egg to emergence. The virgin queen must travel on several mating flights during her first week, and then starts laying a few days later. The previous queen may have left some worker bee eggs and larvae behind, which take 21 days from egg to emergence. This means there could be a window of time lasting 1-7 days where the new colony runs without any baby bees (brood) or eggs.
Varroa mites can only survive 5 days without food. Inducing a swarm through a horizontal hive helps keep the colony in a self-managing broodless cycle, just enough time to starve and kill any varroa in the colony.
Varroa mites feed on honey bee brood and they can only reproduce inside a brood cell with a developing baby bee. For every 1 mite that enters a brood cell, 7 will emerge. Varroa mite infestations quickly mushroom to fatal levels. Imagine the queen laying 2,000 eggs per day. This means each day there are 2,000 brood cells (from eggs laid 8 days earlier) getting capped each day. This also means that 2,000 bees emerge each day (from eggs laid 21 days earlier). A mite can quickly enter a cell before it’s capped, then they start to reproduce. If 10 mites entered cells 21 days ago, 70 emerge today, and if 30 entered cells 20 days ago, 210 emerge tomorrow, and so on.
Downsides of horizontal hives
I ordered my first Layens hive this winter because I want firsthand experience managing a colony in this style. I also want to learn if it’s something I want to start investing in and adding to my apiaries, not only for varroa management but also to avoid lifting heavy hive boxes in the summer. The heaviest thing you pick up with a horizontal hive is a frame of bees. That’s a much different experience than a 50-to-70-lb box of brood or honey.
While I understand the benefits, I’m looking out for some unfavorable things. My list is specific to me and each of these items is relative to the beekeeper and their own goals:
Extracting. Honey harvesting isn’t my primary focus, however, I do extract honey when there’s an excess. With a Layens hive, I don’t plan on extracting honey. If I change my mind, there are specific extractors designed to support Layens frames. I doubt I would purchase one, so another option is to uncap the honeycomb and use a gravity-fed extraction, which takes several days and doesn’t remove as much of the honey as an extractor would.
Equipment. If I run out of equipment during swarm season, I know I can drive to a handful of beekeeping supply stores within a 1-hour drive in any direction. If my single Layens hive has swarm cells and I want to split the colony, not all beekeeping supply stores carry this equipment fit for this hive. I also don’t have another Layens hive to hold the same size frames. I thought about purchasing two to try this year, but I’d rather test out one first before spending more.
Resource sharing. Sometimes one colony is better at bringing in honey than another. Since all of my hives are managed with the same Langstroth equipment, I can easily share resources between colonies that need it. Introducing a Layens hive to the apiary means that I can’t help support this colony the same way, I also can’t take resources from the Layens hive and distribute them among the Langstroth hives—the frames won’t fit.
Splits. What if one colony has a failing queen and needs a frame of eggs and brood to create a new queen? If one of my Langstroth hives needs a frame of eggs and brood, I won’t be able to take any from the Layens hive for the same reason that I can’t share honey between colonies: The frames are different sizes.
Storage. All of my beekeeping equipment spends a few days in the freezer before I cycle it inside for storage. I don’t have a freezer large enough to hold the Layens hive body, so I will never store that hive in the house with my other supplies. I will have room to freeze individual Layens frames, but not the entire hive body. Since the hive body won’t get the freezer treatment, that runs a risk that small hive beetles, wax moths, or other pests may become persistent issues.
The biggest challenge I didn’t include in the list, and that’s getting the hive set up with a colony. I’ve never ordered packages of bees and I don’t plan to. In the next 2-3 months, (swarm season here) I’ll likely move brood from my strongest colony into the Layens. Even though the frames will be different sizes, I could leave the frames long enough for the bees to create a new queen and build comb. My other option is to set up the horizontal hive on a tree line on something elevated, like a ladder, or strapped about 12’ off the ground in a tree. Swarms love to scout and move into cavities they find along tree lines about that height off the ground.
As I learn more about managing bees in Layens hives, I’ll share more. If you already have horizontal hive management experience, let me know the best approach and what I should avoid.