We learned about the history of beekeeping, and that included information on different types of beehives used over the years. I had the children make a collage depicting any type of beehive they chose. Abraham made a Langstroth Hive (shown above). This is the modern kind of beehive which is basically all people use these days. Langstroth was one of the first people to take advantage of "bee space" (the amount of space bees need between sections of comb to feel comfortable) and make it really easy for beekeepers to remove honeycomb without destroying the whole hive. You can see that Abe has shown the vertical frames coming down within the supers, and the queen excluder keeping the queen down in the brood cells rather than up in the honey supers.
Malachi made a rocket-ship-shaped beehive. There is fire below each leg, to keep hungry ants and other crawling insects out of the hive! He wrote "I wonder what it's like to be a bee."
Seb made the "classic" beehive shape, which is on the Utah State Flag. This kind of hive is called a "skep" and it's usually made out of woven or bundled rings of straw. The bees build their own honeycomb inside the hive, so if you harvest the honey, you pretty much have to destroy the hive in the process.
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