Placing a third box on the Warre Beehive

Well the time has come that I have the time to place a third box under one of my Warre Hives. I have two hives and one of them is a lot stronger that the other. The strong hive needs an additional box and within three weeks the second hive will need the additional hive box.

I once again did not smoke the hive as I removed the roof, the wood chip box, and then moved the two hive boxes at the same time. I put the third box on and reassembled the hive.  They did not even seem to care that I had moved the hive and settled down quickly after I reassembled the hive.

Last Minute Stuff

Friday is almost here and I will get two boxes of bees. I still have a few things to accomplish before they get here. The biggest task I have is applying the wax to the top bars. I might have to spend the afternoon working on this project. Tomorrow I will need to put the top bars in the hives and one of the hives needs to be leveled.


I will also need to make sugar water tomorrow so that I can spray the bees in the package before I put them in the hive. The reason I spray them with sugar water is to keep them settled down and keep them from flying out of the box when I go to dump them into the hive. I will also have to make enough sugar water to put into the top feeder. They will need the food for two reasons. First they have be in the box for about three days and only have a small can of sugar water and will need to be fed. Second they will need the sugar water to boost the production of wax to build the hive and food until they can forge and store enough for their needs. I will feed them 1 to 1 sugar water. One part sugar and one part water.

Items Added to Warre Hive

One of the best things to do as you build your own bee hives is watch as many videos and read as many blogs as you can. You will learn no only how each hive works but you will see things others have done that you might want to incorporate into your hives.


This what I did when I decided to build my bee hives. There was a company that sold Warre hives and had done some redesigning to the original hive plans. There was one such improvement I believed I wanted to incorporate into my hives. In the picture below you will notice a small square hole in the side of the hive. It is a place where I will insert the queen and will be able to check it without opening up the hive. I will close it up with a piece of wood that will fit in the hole after the queen has bee released. 

The next improvement was the window. I only put on in as I was not sure how if I wanted one in all of them. As I make additional boxes I will add the windows as I can check on my bees again without intruding into the hive.  My goal with these bees is not to be always having to opening up the hive to check their progress. I will have to check within two weeks to make sure the queen is laying and there is brood. In my next article I will show another item I found on the internet that I have added to my hives.