A bee hive is the habitat for bees. It is where bees build their colonies, produce their young, and make honey and beeswax. It serves as their shelter for security and protection. It is an enclosed structure composed of a matrix of hexagonal cells made of beeswax. There are also man-made structures of beehives which are very often in apiaries. These artificial beehives, made for bee enthusiast, are for honey production and pollination of nearby plants. These are transported for bees to forage into other areas.
To know more about the sizes of bee hives, you must first be familiar with the characteristics and sizes of the components of the bee hive. An artificial bee hive is made up of a hive stand, the bottom board, the hive body, the queen excluder, the honey supers, and the inner and outer cover.
Hive stands are usually made of pallets, or any 4"x4"s. It should provide good stability for your hive. The bottom board is for the entrance of the hive on one end when the hive body is placed on top. It provides the foundation for the hive. The hive body or the brood nest is the first layer of the hive. Three sizes of boxes are used in the bee hives' chambers, deep, medium depth and shallow depth. These are called supers. The hive bodies and the supers should be a tad deeper so it could provide what is called "bee space" where bees fill with beeswax and glue.
Honey supers are where honey is stored. Any size can be used but shallow depth is commonly used. Some use the medium size 6¼" super. Each super contains about 10 frames all with wax foundation for the bees to build their comb.
A queen excluder is optional. It is placed between supers to restrict the queen movements.The inner cover serves as a buffer when taking off the outer cover to work on the hive. The outer cover is the roof of the hive.
Western honey bees are the commonly used bee species in beekeeping. They prefer nest cavities around 45 litres in volume. Usually, these nest cavities have a single entrance. Western honey bees show nest site preferences, with nest height from the ground between 3.3 ft and 16 ft and usually with a downward facing entrance. The distance of the nest sites from the parent colony should be over 980 feet.
There are three popular types of modern or movable hive, the "Langstroth hive" and the "top-bar hive and in the Uk the most popular is called The National hive.
Langstroth hive has been the most commonly used hive style for about 75% of the world's beekeepers. This type includes other varieties which differ in size and number of frames needed. Langstroth hives are rectangular in size and use rectangular boxes without the tops and bottoms or from other variety of materials that are stacked to expand the space for bees. The minimum size of the hive is dependent on the temperature outside and the sources of their food during the winter season. The colder the weather, the bigger the hive should be so they could store more food.