Honey in a stacked fixed-comb hive is usually harvested with whole sections of comb. Upper boxes become candidates once they are free of brood and the remaining colony will be adequately supplied. A heavy honey box may still be part of the stores the colony needs, so the decision to remove it follows an assessment of the boxes below.12
Harvesting the combs also removes some of the older comb from the hive. This relationship shapes Christ’s and Warré’s management: provide room for new comb below and take off combs with their honey above once the colony can spare them. How far this succeeds in a given year depends on comb building and the distribution of brood and stores.34
Assessing the stores that will remain
Before harvesting, decide which boxes the colony is to keep. Their stores must last until the next dependable food supply or be supplemented by feeding planned in good time. An expected late nectar flow is not treated as honey already stored. Christ explicitly allows for a long, unfavourable spring in which consumption increases with brood rearing.56
Weight helps with this assessment if the weight of the hive parts is known. Wood, top bars, comb and bees all contribute to the reading. For the harvest decision, what matters particularly is what will remain after the intended honey box is removed. Otherwise, the total weight of a tall hive can conceal a shortage of stores in the lower boxes.2
Warré’s allowance of twelve kilograms of winter stores relates to his hive and his conditions. Accounts in the Warré archive give substantially different amounts according to climate. If there is no reliable assessment for the local site, leave the honey box concerned with the colony for the time being. Weight records through winter help establish local consumption.72
Checking harvest timing and honey ripeness
Christ prefers spring, once winter is over, for a substantial part of the harvest; Warré harvests at the end of summer and arranges the winter stores at the same time. Both relate the timing to the colony’s food supply. Today, harvesting must also be coordinated with the necessary varroa measures. Waiting for an additional honey crop must not cause the appropriate time for those measures to pass.869
Capped areas of honey give an initial indication of ripeness, but even capped honey may still be too wet after a heavy nectar flow. Measure the water content with a checked refractometer before harvesting, taking samples from both the centre and the edges of the intended box. The LWG recommends a water content below 18 per cent for honey that will keep. Leave any area that is too wet with the colony for now.10
Honey prone to rapid crystallisation can set while still in the comb, making it harder to recover by draining. During such nectar flows, check ripeness in good time. A whole box is nevertheless harvested only when its brood and stores also allow removal.112
Removing the honey box
Hooked knife for freeing attached comb and a separating wire for parting occupied hive boxes. AI-generated schematic illustration.
Before opening the hive, have a cover for the remaining boxes, a safe support and closable containers for the harvest ready. Collect even small scraps of comb wet with honey. Exposed honey can provoke robbing, especially when the nectar flow has already declined.12
Loosen the intended box. After removing the roof and top cover, carefully open the joint with the box below. Cut wax attachments with a suitable wire before lifting the box off. Christ draws the wire along the plane of the comb surfaces through the joint; forcing the boxes apart would tear the comb uncontrollably.13
Confirm the absence of brood. Examine the combs in the loosened box from below and through the spaces between them. If tilting the box, orient it so that the combs remain in their vertical plane. Replace the box if brood is found. If hidden areas cannot be assessed adequately, the absence of brood has not yet been established.142
Clear the bees from the harvest box. Warré drives them down with smoke. A suitably constructed bee escape instead allows them to leave the upper box and return to the colony. Fit it between the harvest box and the remaining hive, then replace the cover and roof above. The box must be broodless and must not contain the queen. Any drones present must also be able to pass through the exits. If many bees remain, investigate the cause before harvesting.1516
Secure the harvest and close the colony. Cover the box once it is free of bees and take it to the processing room. Immediately restore the complete cover to the remaining hive, including the cloth and quilt box for a Warré hive. Check the stores left behind against the original assessment after removal. Take a further box only if the colony can spare that one too.17
Recovering honey from the combs
Cutaway of a honey press with a screw, straining bag and perforated basket. AI-generated schematic illustration.
Cut the combs out of the box with a clean knife and collect them in a food-grade container. Brood must not enter the processing batch; set aside any suspect or contaminated pieces of comb. Warré also separates pieces rich in pollen from the rest of the harvest. He leaves a narrow, straight strip of comb on each top bar as a starter.1811
For draining, crush the comb and place it on a suitable sieve or straining cloth over a second container. The time required varies with the honey. Keep the container covered while it drains so that the honey does not absorb moisture or foreign odours. Equipment and containers must be dry when used.1110
A press suitable for honey can recover more honey from the remaining comb pieces; strain this honey as well. Draining and pressing destroy the comb structure, after which the wax is processed separately. Warré also describes extractor cages that support cut-out combs during centrifugal extraction.1920
Following comb renewal
After the harvest, prepare the emptied box for later use underneath a hive. A different section of comb now occupies the top of the inhabited hive. If the bees continue building downwards and the brood nest moves with them, this section may in turn become a honey box in a later season. Christ describes this as a major benefit of his stacked-box hives.34
David Heaf also reports colonies whose upper box could not be harvested for several years because it still contained brood or the boxes below lacked stores. Marking boxes with the year in which their combs were built shows which combs have actually been renewed and which have remained in the colony.4
Where renewal has not occurred for a long time, assess the condition of the old comb specifically. Removing a box needed for brood or food merely to follow a renewal schedule would weaken the colony accordingly. Comb suspected of harbouring disease requires a separate examination; it is not removed and processed as part of the ordinary honey harvest.421
Nucleus colony
A new colony formed by the beekeeper rather than by waiting for a swarm. Brood and bees from a strong colony are placed in an empty hive.
Christ makes nucleus colonies “after the Franconian manner”: a piece of brood comb four to five inches square is placed in an empty hive, and the bees rear a queen from it (K1 §5). He prefers this method to swarming and allows about a hundred boxes for an apiary of ten colonies, four of which are to swarm (K4 §26).
Combs in a straw skep are fixed in place. Harvesting the honey requires cutting them out and destroys the colony in the process. The usual practice was to set the skep over burning sulphur and suffocate the bees.
Christ calls this the “old routine of most country people, which can hardly be rooted out: in autumn they slaughter and suffocate the heaviest and the lightest hives, irresponsibly and quite sinfully” (K3 §2).
Christ also objects to the quality of honey obtained this way: it is “fouled with brood, dead bees, the smell of sulphur and the like” (K3 §6).
Christ’s word for an individual box in his stacked hive. It consists of four planed boards, measures thirteen inches square externally and four and a half inches high, and has an entrance at the front, a pane of glass at the back, a cornice at the top and a grid beneath it (K3 §4).
The boxes have neither floors nor lids. The lowest stands on a floorboard that also serves as a landing board (K3 §9); the top one receives a cover of wood, glass or plaited straw (K3 §4).
For a colony that is not to swarm, Christ allows eight boxes over the summer; for a young swarm, six (K4 §26).
Placing an empty box on top of a full one. Christ considers this easier, but nevertheless does not use it to expand the hive:
“Setting on would of course be somewhat more comfortable than setting under; but it will not do. The nature of bees is to build from the top downwards, and to go on building where they have left off.” (K4 §26, footnote)
He does add vessels above for harvesting. Glasses and porcelain vessels are inverted on the top box’s cover so that the bees can build into them from below; the comb is cut with a silk thread or thin piano wire (K3 §5).
The modern German word for any human-made bee dwelling originated in forest beekeeping. Christ writes that forest bees are “drawn into hollow trees or into Büten or Beuten hewn out expressly for the purpose” and belong to the forest owner (K9 §2).
He does not use the word for his own boxes, which he calls Aufsatz, Kästchen, Magazin or Bienenwohnung.
The gap bees leave open in their hive rather than filling it with comb. Combs hung at this distance can be removed individually without cutting. Lorenzo Langstroth described the spacing in 1851 and received a patent for a hive using it on 5 October 1852.
In this repository, the statement is supported by a search summary covering several pages rather than by the patent document itself (source key langstroth-1852).
A measurement from a source read directly appears in Warré. He leaves twelve millimetres between two top bars, expressly “pour le passage des abeilles” [for the bees to pass through] (Warré 1948, p. 49).
Dzierzon
The priest associated with beekeeping’s transition to movable comb. Writing in 1889, Johann Witzgall recounts that Dzierzon began keeping bees “mit dem Christ'schen Magazinstocke” [with Christ’s stacked-box hive] and through experimentation developed “den jetzt allgemein verbreiteten Stock mit beweglichen Waben” [the now widely used hive with movable combs] (Witzgall, Geschichte der Bienenzucht 1889, p. 56).
The changes began with Christ’s comb-supporting grid. Dzierzon fitted the boxes with movable bars and attached comb to them so that each comb could be lifted out separately. Side doors, fixed floorboards, ledges on the inner walls, shorter and taller boxes and a fixed lid followed (Witzgall, Geschichte der Bienenzucht 1889, p. 56). Christ nails down the six wooden strips of his grid (K3 §4).
In 1844, Dzierzon presented his invention publicly. The distinction between movable- and fixed-comb beekeeping dates from that year (Witzgall/Felgentreu 1889, p. 102).
Witzgall writes forty years after the event and does not quote Dzierzon himself.
The opening through which bees enter and leave. Every box in Christ’s hive has one, four inches long and 1¼ inches high, with two metal slides in front (K3 §4).
Christ explains its size in terms of the air bees need when confinement is necessary and the ease of feeding (K3 §4, footnote).
Since every box has its own entrance, adding a box underneath requires another step: two or three hours later, the upper entrance is closed completely, “otherwise they do not readily build on” (K3 §9).
Four strips of wood glued and nailed to the top of each box. They support the grid and project a quarter of an inch outwards (K3 §4).
Christ gives two purposes for the projection. It forms an ornament, shaped with an ogee plane, and ensures that “all the supers fit well on one another and stand firm if one should turn out ¼ or ½ inch larger or smaller than another” (K3 §4).
This projecting rim prevents wall thickness from being read off the engraved plate. The oblique view in Fig. 1 shows the wall and cornice together at the edge.
Émile Warré (1867–1951) was a French priest and beekeeper. His Ruche
Populaire (“People’s Hive”) was intended to be simple to build and manage.
He described its construction and management in L’Apiculture pour tous,
whose twelfth edition appeared in 1948.
Christ’s own addition to the stacked-box hive. A hole seven inches long and two and a half inches high is chiselled in the rear wall of each box, the glass is fitted into it, and a small shutter excludes the light (K3 §4).
At the end of the same section, in a passage for readers wishing to omit all other refinements, he gives his judgement: “A glass pane in the rear board, however, is almost indispensable.” (K3 §4)
He answers the obvious objection from observation. Bees attach comb to glass as firmly as to wood or straw and keep it clean; what they coat in autumn, they clean again in spring (K3 §11).
The French word for a box placed above another. Palteau’s hive consists of a table, three legs, several hausses, a cover and a landing board; each box measures one foot square and three inches high (Palteau 1777, pp. 7–11).
Christ has not read Palteau in the original. In a footnote to the preface, he writes that only years after his own invention did he read “something of similar bee dwellings”, “such as those of Herr Palteau in France and the Vicat one, which Schirach in his allgemeinen Bienenvater describes” (Vorrede).
A textbook of religious doctrine arranged in questions and answers. Every child worked through it in lessons and learnt the answers by heart; the form was therefore familiar even to readers who read little else.
In 1784, Christ applies it to bees while distinguishing his purpose from that of the classroom. Catechetical teaching is “für den gemeinen Mann die faßlichste und deutlichste” [the easiest for ordinary people to grasp and understand]; he intends no catechism “zum Auswendiglernen, sondern blos zum Unterricht und Nachschlagen” [for memorising, but only for instruction and reference] (Christ 1784, p. VI). His Bienencatechismus für das Landvolk consists of 197 numbered questions, some of which state the opinions he opposes.
Log hive
A log hive is a hollowed section of a felled trunk used to house bees. Unlike a cavity in a living tree, the whole hive can be taken to another site.
A word at the foot of a printed page that repeats the first word of the next. The compositor used it to keep the sheets in order.
It can cause errors in this project: including the catchword when transcribing an old page duplicates a word. In the Vicat source text, three catchwords appear at the head of the following page rather than the foot of the preceding one: “festiget,” (110/111), “einiche,” (118/119), “voraus,” (120/121).
Stacked-box hive, Magazin
A hive made up of several boxes stacked vertically, each removable separately. Christ calls it a Magazin or Magazinstock.
He describes bees having “their household in joined supers … that are increased or reduced from time to time as circumstances, the season and one's intentions require” (K3 §3).
Christ presents wood and glass as innovations. The usual stacked hives had been made of straw, “at least I have seen none of any other kind”; their drawbacks led him to square wooden boxes with a pane of glass (K3 §3).
Beekeeping with movable combs. Its German name arose alongside the contrasting term Stabilbau. In 1889, Witzgall and Felgentreu date both to 1844: “Seit 1844, wo Dr. Dzierzon zuerst mit seiner Erfindung öffentlich hervortrat, spricht man in Imkerkreisen von einem beweglichen oder unbeweglichen Bienenstocke, vom Mobil- oder Stabilbau.” [Since 1844, when Dr Dzierzon first presented his invention publicly, beekeepers have spoken of movable or immovable hives, of movable- or fixed-comb beekeeping.] (Witzgall/Felgentreu 1889, p. 102)
Christ predates this distinction. The bee specialist F. Gerstung later defined his contribution precisely: “in Deutschland der eigentliche Begründer der Mobilbienenzucht … freilich nicht so sehr der Beweglichkeit jeder einzelnen Wabe … als vielmehr der Mobilität, d.h. der Beweglichkeit von Teilen des Bienenstockes, von Auf- und Untersätzen” [in Germany the true founder of movable-comb beekeeping … admittedly less of the mobility of each individual comb … than of the mobility of parts of the hive, of upper and lower boxes] (quoted in Bode 1984, p. 381).
Witzgall/Felgentreu 1889, p. 102
Nadiring
The technical term for adding a box underneath: an empty box is placed below a full one. It describes the operation Christ calls Untersetzen.
The earliest vertically divided hive using this method documented in the project is Gedde’s octagonal box. It has two iron handles “for lifting it up when another is to be placed under it” (Gedde 1677, pp. 18–19).
Top bar
A top bar is a wooden strip to whose underside the bees attach a comb. The comb may also be attached to the hive walls. A top bar alone therefore does not make the comb individually movable.
Lorenzo Langstroth described bee space in 1851: a gap of about a centimetre that bees leave open rather than filling it with comb. He received a patent for it on 5 October 1852. Since then, combs have hung in frames that can be removed individually; this remains the most widespread construction in much of the world.
Christ’s stacked-box hive predates this development. In his hive, the movable unit is the box, lifted off whole while its combs remain inside. The bee specialist F. Gerstung therefore called him the founder “der Mobilität, d.h. der Beweglichkeit von Teilen des Bienenstockes, von Auf- und Untersätzen” [of mobility, that is, the mobility of parts of the hive, of upper and lower boxes] (quoted in Bode 1984, p. 381).
Christ uses the word Rähmchen once, in a different sense: the pane of glass in a straw box is “fitted into a small wooden frame” (K3 §8).
A ring skep consists of straw rings of equal diameter, stacked to form a
shared interior. More rings can be added to enlarge the hive. Fixed crossbars
support the combs and allow individual sections to be removed with their comb.
AI-generated schematic illustration after Fleischer (1777).
Fleischer 1777, pp. 311–314; explanation of the plate, Figs. 2–4
Rose, Rosentafel
Christ’s term for a comb. He uses it as a synonym for Wachstafel and combines the two when explaining how young colonies can be recognised: “by the whiteness and delicacy of their wax combs or roses” (K2 §10).
Compound forms occur throughout the book. Honigrosen are honey-filled combs (K3 §5), while Bruttafeln contain brood (K4 §2).
The comb guide in Christ’s box. Wooden strips, each one inch wide, are nailed into the rebates of the front and rear cornice strips; the bees align their comb with them (K3 §4).
The number depends on the position in the stack. Only the top box receives six strips, “so that the bees attach and build their combs in this direction, from the rear wall toward the flight hole”. The lower boxes receive two, since the bees continue in the direction already established (K3 §4).
Christ gives three reasons for using fewer strips below: the colony clusters more closely in winter, debris does not collect on the wood, and bees can move up and down more easily (K3 §4). To support heavy honey combs, each box with two strips also receives a cross made of two round willow or hazel sticks (K3 §4).
A bee that flies out before a swarm to seek a new dwelling.
Spurbiene is Christ’s own term, although he considers the behaviour unproven. The idea that bees “some days before swarming, seek out a hollow tree by means of scouts, or so-called scout bees” belongs, in his view, “in truth quite among the mere conjectures” (K4 §9). He nevertheless accepts it for hunger swarms, having watched individual bees clean an empty hive for days before a swarm moved in three days later. He does not regard scouts as a separate caste: they are “of course no special kind of bee” (K4 §9).
A hundred and eighty years later, experiments with boxes in the forest measured the criteria by which a swarm chooses a nest. These criteria underpin the story “A bee in search of a home” (Seeley and Morse 1978, cited indirectly rather than read in full).
Beekeeping in hives without movable frames. Comb is firmly attached to the ceiling and walls. To remove it, the comb is cut free or taken out with the hive section to which it is attached.
Witzgall and Felgentreu date the distinction between fixed- and movable-comb beekeeping to 1844, the year Dzierzon presented his invention publicly (Witzgall/Felgentreu 1889, p. 102). By 1889, the same authors already regard fixed comb as needing justification. They open their chapter by suggesting that some readers may be surprised to find it included, “nachdem man ja doch schon längst den Stabilbetrieb als veraltet und für die heutigen Zeiten als abgethan betrachtet…” [since fixed-comb management has long been regarded as outdated and no longer relevant to the present day…] (Witzgall/Felgentreu 1889, p. 209).
Christ does not know the term. In his time, there is nothing from which fixed-comb beekeeping needs to be distinguished.
Witzgall/Felgentreu 1889, pp. 102 and 209
Straw skep
The ordinary bee dwelling of country people in Christ’s time: a basket coiled from straw ropes, made in one piece and impossible to divide. Honey is harvested by cutting out the comb, and the colony dies in the process (K3 §2).
Christ proposes his stacked-box hives instead. An apiary of thirty to thirty-six of them is “worth more than an apiary of 100 pieces in straw baskets” (K4 §26).
He also describes continued use of the skep. In K3 §10, he explains how to place a straw skep on a lower hive box, seal the skep’s entrance and thereby draw the bees down into the boxes.
A small basket placed on top of a straw skep for the bees to fill with honey comb. Christ uses the country people’s terms: “the small baskets (caps, hoods) which the country people set on the straw baskets” (K4 §26, footnote).
Their limited use strengthens his objection to adding space above. Of ten colonies, scarcely one or two build into them, and only in a particularly good honey year; many prefer to build outside rather than in the basket above (K4 §26, footnote).
The same box as an Aufsatz, occupying a different position in the stack. Christ explains the term in a footnote:
“I shall hardly need to remark that by lower supers I understand nothing else than those supers which stand lowest, because they are mostly only ever set underneath; and they may all be called little boxes, on account of their likeness to such.” (K3 §4, footnote)
The name follows the position in the stack. The comb-supporting grid differs: six strips in the top box, two in the lower boxes (K3 §4).
Placing an empty box beneath a full one. This is Christ’s way of expanding the hive and the operation around which his entire management system is organised.
He specifies the timing: once the lowest box is “built somewhat more than half or to three parts full”, the next goes beneath it, and so on into August (K3 §9). Only one is added at a time, since “the bees build more readily into one empty super than into two” (K3 §9).
He describes the work twice. His earlier method takes place very early in the morning, with a helper lifting the hive while the other person withdraws the floorboard (K3 §9). His later, improved method is at midday, during peak flight, when “Out of industry and eagerness in bringing in they trouble themselves about nothing” (K3 §9).
The resin bees use to seal crevices and attach comb, now called propolis.
Christ explicitly distinguishes it from wax: “The cement or fore-wax, which is different from wax and is properly a sticky resin, though after being worked and especially in the cold it becomes quite hard” (K1 §14).
He uses it when populating a hive. Melted over coals and brushed into the corners of a new box, it keeps a young swarm in place; a previously used box already coated with resin provides the same advantage without the work (K4 §21).
The old German word for the queen. Christ uses both terms together: “The queen, called by the ancients the Weisel” (K1 §1).
In compounds, the older term has remained more common. Weisellosigkeit means the condition of a colony without a queen; Christ devotes a separate section to it (K5 §6).
A medieval forest beekeeper who kept bees in hollow trees and paid dues for doing so. In his chapter on law, Christ connects the occupation with rights over trees: “the Zeidler company formerly arose from this, who pay a certain rent in honey and wax to the forester or to some other lord of the forest” (K9 §2).
For him, this belongs to the past. The house and garden bees of his own time belong “among our domestic animals” (K9 §2).
The unit of length Christ uses has not been conclusively identified. There was no uniform inch; each region had its own.
Only once in the whole book does Christ write “lines Paris inch”, when giving the length of a queen. Before that, he has already used inch twenty-four times without qualification (Anmerkungen des Übertragers).
The transcriber compared the construction dimensions with Christ’s stated volume of four Maß. Using the Paris inch (2.71 cm) produces a discrepancy of 27 to 34 per cent; the Frankfurt inch (2.37 cm), one of 1 to 8 per cent. He concludes that the lengths cannot be expressed in Paris inches and that the conversion factor lies between 2.4 and 2.5 (Anmerkungen des Übertragers).
This is an inference, not a statement by Christ, who nowhere specifies which inch he means.
The old church due: approximately a tenth of a farm’s annual produce, delivered as crops, wine or livestock. Part of it paid the parish priest, who collected it from the same people to whom he preached on Sundays.
Christ collected tithes himself and went to court over them. When a tithe income ceased, he received land instead, a “Besoldungsstük zum Ersaz des Zehnden” [a plot of land forming part of his salary in compensation for the tithe] (Bode 1984, p. 181).
Bode 1984, p. 181
Bienenkiste
The Bienenkiste is a long, horizontal fixed-comb hive with the brood area at the front and the honey area at the rear. Its removable floor gives access to the combs from below.
Zeidlerei is a traditional form of forest beekeeping in which bees are kept in cavities cut into living trees. Current initiatives revive the craft both for keeping bees and for creating habitats for species that live in tree cavities.
This sample contains stored food taken from close to the brood nest. A laboratory examines it for spores of the bacterium that causes American foulbrood.
Hive debris is material that falls from the colony onto the hive floor, such as wax particles, pollen and dead mites. Its composition and distribution give clues to activity in the colony, including comb building, food consumption and the position of the winter cluster.
Flavonoids are secondary plant compounds that also occur in honey. Their measured total content describes one aspect of its chemical composition. A higher value alone does not demonstrate an additional health benefit from the honey.
David Heaf is a beekeeper and author in Wales. Together with Patricia Heaf, he translated Warré’s L’Apiculture pour tous into English. His website brings together plans, management methods and accounts of beekeeping with the Warré hive.
Phil Chandler is a beekeeper and the author of The Barefoot Beekeeper. He developed his own horizontal top-bar hive for beekeeping with few interventions in the brood nest and published freely available construction plans.
