This page is credited in full to Dave Cushman who created it. His voice is expressed in black colour text and any additions or comments in blue belong to myself Credit: Dave Cushman’s website.
PH.
The first long hive that I came across was the one designed by Commander Tredwell… I have some details stashed away somewhere!
As Robin Dartington has copyrighted his information, I will eventually produce some drawings of parts that will be fully interchangeable with the individual parts of his Dartington hive type, but structured in such a way to circumvent his copyright. At least by those means the method may become more widely used. This hive is unusual as it uses the ‘Extra Deep’ 14″ x 12″ frame type, although in recent years he has introduced a version that can take ordinary deep B.S. brood frames.
Barry Birkey’s American version is of course based on Langstroth hive dimensions, but is similar in many respects to those designs that have gone before.
The Breeding station hive is built using 18 mm thick waterproof plywood and is screwed down to a trestle that in turn has it’s legs embedded solidly in the ground (an anti vandal feature). It occupies the area of two B.S. National brood boxes and it has an arrangement of internal slots that are spaced at a frame pitch of 37 mm so that the internal volume can be divided by slide-in separators that can be solid plywood board or queen excluder panels.
There are several entrances that can be opened or closed at will. The objective was to provide an environment for producing queencells that was at all times queenright, but the queen herself was kept far enough away from the developing cells so that the queen pheromones had little influence.
In essence most long idea type hives are similar to ‘top bar’ hives, but utilising normal frames instead of just top bars.