Swisshive - Spherical Beehive design

http://swisshive.ch/der-swisshive/

An switzerland company is producing spherical beehive design. It’s very interesting concept as most conventional beehive designs are either rectangle or square. I have not had seen many english websites or news talk about this spherical beehive at all. Only found the website but in swiss and it’s quite hard to understand with google translation.

The big downside is that there are only two of each size combs. This means you do not have interchangable combs. A pain to maintain. I don’t even have different sized boxes because of this. I have all medium depth langstroth frames. Here you would have two of each size frame and five different size combs.

Same shape as a sunhive
Do you plaster it in cow dung?
:wink:

The cathedral hive uses a half hexagon shaped frame in a horizontal configuration. It’s like a top bar hive with another top bar hive flipped on top.

That looks like top hive design, instead of flat roof, it has hexagon roof.

That’s essentially what it is, a ‘bent’ top bar. The resulting comb is pretty impressive

Really cool indeed, you have much taller frame thus provide more space for bee to build combs.
One thing about Top Bar hive design, how do you seperate brood box from super box? are there like vertical queen excluder in Top Bar hive design?

There are designs that incorporate a vertical excluder but you won’t find many traditional ktb (kenyan top bar) bee keepers using them. The bees generally keep the brood and honey stores separate enough for the beekeeper to take frames that only include honey.