Bees in nature live very differently than ‘treated’ & kept bees. Find out how natural principles have shaped the Ez-Bees hive designs. The people below have not endorsed the Ez-Bees project though Dr. Tom has been very encouraging.
Tell the Bees… A story about bees and courtship
Surprise: Bees Need Meat… from Scientific American.
Find out why commercial sugar feeding (instead of letting the bees keep their honey) may be starving bees to death.
Reasons for Constructing a horizontal hive with extra deep frames
Lazutin recommends building the hive with double walls. For the inner lining, he says solid wood is best, though plywood is adequate. An interesting sidenote is that L.L. Langstroth also recommended double-walled hives to provide insulation, but he correctly predicted that “Such is the passion of the American people for cheapness in the first cost of an article, even at the evident expense of dearness in the end, that many, I doubt not, will continue to lodge their bees in thin hives in spite of their conviction of the folly of doing…”
A layer of insulation should go between the inner and outer walls. Lazutin recommends 1 1/2″ to 2″ of foam polystyrene. He says 2″ is equivalent to 5″-6″ of wood. However one could also use natural materials like flax fiber mats.