A Second Warre Hive

There is a Japanese user on Youtube called mituro36 who has uploaded a large number of videos on native Japanese honeybees. After I watched his videos (both in Japanese and in English) about how to make a traditional Japanese beehive several months ago, I have wanted to build one according to his plans. So yesterday I constructed a beehive that is somewhere in between his plans and the hive that Yuji Inoue brought last week. It has some of the features but not all of each of the two hives.

The wood I used to make the supers is Japanese cryptomeria (Sugi no ki), and it has a cedar-like aromatic smell. I bought one board that was 4 meters long, 200 mm wide, and 35 mm thick. That is one heavy piece of wood. One empty finished super by itself weighs 4 kilograms (almost 9 pounds). The hive is comprised of 3 supers plus a base, inner cover, and telescoping outer cover. The total empty weight is about 31 pounds (14 kg). A friend who is a carpenter with many power tools, Teruo Shiki, helped me cut the wood and assemble the parts. I learned how to do things more quickly and efficiently with his help, so it only took us a couple of hours to cut and assemble the whole thing.

I still need to take my gas torch and burn the inside and outside of the hive to eliminate the aromatic smell, and I plan to melt some beeswax on the inside of the inner cover and in front of the entrance. Even though the hive was pretty simple to build, it gave me a really good feeling of accomplishment and pride to make it and have it turn out so well. But as they say, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, so I will ultimately only feel really good about it after it has a colony of Japanese honeybees living in it and I have been able to harvest a super full of honey from it. If things go well, maybe that will happen sometime during the next three years while I am here in Japan. I am not sure how well a hive like this would work for European honeybees, but I think it is ideal for Japanese honeybees. Japanese honeybees store their honey in the top of the hive and have their brood in the bottom. I might try this style hive in the U.S. though when I go back–just to see how it works.