The parts of a hive

A hive is a stack, read from the ground up: the floor and the entrance it leaves, the one or two brood boxes the colony lives in, the excluder, the supers and the roof. A super is a brood box in another job, and which side of the excluder it goes is your choice.

Inside each box stand frames of comb. The excluder keeps the queen below it, so those boxes are the only comb she can lay in. The honey around her brood is the colony's winter reserve, not yours; above it is the surplus. A frame holds seven thousand cells, so beekeepers count frames rather than bees.

The entrance is a door that can be made smaller: a reducer narrows it in autumn, and while a colony is too weak to guard. A mouse guard goes on with the last feeding. Running out of room is next.