Bee Barn
a Pacific Northwest Coastal Beehive for cool, damp climates.

Craig Carmichael
May 28th 2021


On the Pacific Northwest coast, increasingly as one goes north, the climate is not very conducive to keeping honey bees. The winters are mild, but nights are cool to cold, days are often cloudy and it rains a lot. This becomes more pronounced with latitude. By Haida Gwaii, the BC north coast and Alaska most people living on the coast who want to keep bees have thrown up their hands and said it's just not practical.

One part of what's not very practical is usually trying to keep typical bee varieties like Italian that like dry weather and hot summers. Those are the varieties to have over most of continental North America and so they are most widely available. Bees such as Carniolan fare better in cooler, damper summers, but since "cooler and damper" doesn't describe most areas, they are harder to source.

But another big part of what's not practical is the standard Langstroth bee hive. The uninsulated wooden boxes are implicitly intended for areas where the bees are naturally warm all summer. In cooler oceanic climes they can expend much of their energy just keeping the hive warm, even in summer and most nights all year. Thus a key to having the bees prosper is to make it easy for them to keep warm.

The key to the Bee Barn idea is the permanent large main box. It is as tall as a Langstroth Deep plus a Medium put together. In fact, mine is built around one of each, toe-screwed together above and below. Thus the internal horizontal dimensions are the same as a 10 frame Langstroth, but it has much more room. It has been described as the "Goldilocks" size.

The box is insulated with 1 inch extruded styrene foam from a building supply store. In my version, the outside is covered with waxed 1/4 inch birch plywood so that the insulation isn't exposed (it would degrade), yet without adding as much weight as thicker boards would. The insulation of course makes it much easier keep the hive warm. The almost cubic shape also contributes, having less surface area for the volume.





The top (above) and the floor (below, upside down) are also insulated,
again with waxed plywood enclosing the insulation when complete.




Another contributor to heat retention is spacer boards and spacer insulation. If a hive is going strong and full of bees, then the full bore is used. But say a 5-frame nuc is installed: Why should the smaller number of bees have to heat a large void space? The spacer boards can be inserted, moved inward, and pieces of styrene insulation inserted around the outsides to eliminate the space of the other five tall frames. (Virtually no heat will escape to the sides with inches of insulation there!)

Speaking of nucs, five special frames are made where only the bottom part is filled in. The top part has only a thin edge that will fit just outside a regular frame. The frames from the nuc are slid in to the special frames, together making a tall frame.

Spacers can be removed and empty frames added as the colony grows. At some point a second story can be added - a super, again with insulated walls, for honey harvesting.




Ten of the new Tall frames make up about 17 or 18 Langstroth deep frames.
Thus 6 or 7 Tall frames is equivalent to a 10 frame 'deep super'.



The new Tall frame (above) contrasted with regular Langstroth deep frames,
which would fill just over half the new box (below).



The tall frame shown is two regular black 10" frames cut and put together using bridging pieces of white ABS plastic
across the join on the outside ends (just visible), all solved together with methylene chloride. (Scraps of ABS and m.c. are from a plastics shop. I use a glass eyedropper to apply the m.c. It evaporates quickly without residue; avoid breathing/smelling it while working.) Putting together a 10" and a 6" frame leaves a gap in between, an inch or two that the bees can fill as they please, eg, with drone or queen cells. Or, tall size wooden frames with horizontal wires can be made in the usual way.

The next improvement to be added is a roof and walls over and around the landing and hive entrance area to keep it dry even in the west coast's frequent blowing rains. (Oh, and solid carrying handles - this box is heavy enough even without bees! But in normal operation in a fixed location there is no reason to move or lift it.)

The tall frames are of course heavier than shorter ones, but there are fewer of them to lift out to inspect any given size of hive, and it's only necessary to pull out one at a time for inspecting at any time. And as it is the bottom box of any hive, while a honey super may have to be removed from on top to get at it, it is never necessary to move this big brood box to get at a box underneath. That's less lifting and less disturbance to the bees.

This bee barn design is adapted from the original "Bee Barn" design by Jim of "Vino Farm" youtube channel, May 2021.
Thank you Jim for freely sharing your designs and findings!