Bees Housing

 INTRODUCTION

Beekeeping is the maintenance of honey bee colonies, commonly in hives by humans. A beekeeper (or apiarist) keeps bees in order to collect their honey and other products that the hive produces (including beeswax, propolis, pollen and royal jelly, to pollinate crops, or to produce bees for sale to other beekeepers. A location where bees are kept is called an apiary or "bee yard".

Beekeeping in Rwanda has been practiced for many years through successive generations and along inherited patterns. However, the activity has basically been traditional and of subsistence in nature, where honey was used as a food product for home, medicine and for brewing traditional liquor.

 HOUSING

Bees live in hives. In Rwanda, we have three types of hives: traditional, Kenyan and Langsthroth hives.

1. Traditional bee hive

This is a traditional bee hive made of euchalyptus branches, bamboo, French cameroon  grass, etc. It is covered with cow dung  or banana leaves. This hive does not yield much honey but helps bee keepers to attract bees.

2. Kenyan top bar hive

Beekeeping naturally promotes the Kenyan Top Bar Hive as one of the most effective natural bee hives for backyard and small-scale Beekeepers (Bee-carers).

The hive is quite simple in concept. Combs are supported by bars of wood which lay across the narrow width of the trough-like hive-body. The width of each top-bar is equivalent to the natural width of a comb plus a bee-space (35 mm).

Kenyan top bar hive

3. Langsthroth bee hive

 In modern beekeeping, a Langstroth hive is any vertically modular bee hive that accepts frames that are locally referred to as "Langstroth" frames. Historically, a "Langstroth hive" is the hive that was designed by Rev. L. L. Langstroth in 1852. The advantage of this hive is that the bees build honey comb into frames which can be moved with ease. The frames are designed to prevent bees from attaching honeycombs where they would either connect adjacent frames, or connect frames to the walls of the hive. The movable frames allow the beekeeper to manage the bees in a way which was formerly impossible.