The Cube Hive Makes its Debut

Sorry, I don't have a 'what the yard likes like' pic, I keep forgetting lately.  I've been working on expanding my egg operation to two dozen a day.  Actually, you'd probably be able to see the edge of the chicken yard in such a pic.  I have a movable poultry net fence.  It allows the chickens to eat more bugs and less feed, which is good.

But on to the topic du jour, the Parker Cube Hive.

 Here, you can see the basic form of the hive.  It is intended to be all mediums as a 14 frame medium is about the same comb area as a deep.  A 12 (regular) frame deep is heavy as is, without any bees in it at all.  But all I had was deeps with bees on them, so I had to build a deep to use for transition.  The bottom is a purpose built box, bottom attached, 1.5" hole entrance.  Eventually it will probably have a disc entrance on it for skunks.

The top is a Michael Bush style top, just a piece of plywood (though thicker than he uses) with two shims to elevate one end.  Just for fun, it has a bevelled edge on the front, maybe to keep rain and snow out.  I don't know, I didn't design it that way.  I just happen to have a piece of plywood left over from building my chicken coop and it had an angle on it.

I have two hives made up, two purpose built bottoms, two lids, 6 supers, 1 deep.  The purpose in my mind for this project is to see if placing successive boxes with frames at right angles to each other will have any effect.  I'm also wondering if square boxes will have any effect on cluster size.  A side benefit is that for the same comb area, using boxes with extra frames results in significantly shorter hives.

Here's the entrance.  In it, you can see the bottom end of the PF-120 frames.  They have been trimmed to 1.25" end bars.  I put the older queen of the double queen hive from the previous post in this hive.  If I had to guess, I'd say they are eagerly intending to supersede her again as a number of supersedure cells were under construction.  I should keep an eye on this hive to hopefully be able to divide those queen cells up for new hives.

Behold, the Parker Cube Hive!

A while ago, I decided to build a set of square hives.  Traditional Langstroth hives are 19 7/8" long and 16 1/4" wide.  I think it had something to do with the size of a wine box at the time. 

So I decided to build a hive that was the same length as it was in width.  Inquiring at Beesource, I discovered that this idea was not new and that there are square hives in other countries.  At some point I discovered while building it in Google Sketchup, that three mediums is about 19 7/8" tall.  Presto, three medium hive is a cube hive.  Coincidentally, it's also approximately equal to three deeps depending on how you calculate the comb area.

Some benefits I'm expecting:  more efficient use of wood, shorter hive, more spherical cluster, bigger hives, and the ability to place successive boxes at 90 degrees to one another.

Here's a picture of a deep I made to help make the transition from deeps to mediums.  12 standard frames fit comfortably.

Here are frames trimmed to 1 1/4".  Notice you can fit 14 frames and not be tight at the ends.

Finally, as I mentioned above, three mediums forms a cube.  It's not precisely a cube on the inside due to the thickness of the wood, but that won't stop me from calling it the Parker Cube Hive.  

Hopefully I'll get the opportunity to utilize them fully this year.