Nine years ago was our first year beekeeping and my husband’s first adventure in learning how to build a 10 frame Langstroth beehive. You might be asking is it cheaper to build your own bee hive? Absolutely yes! A new Langstroth beehive costs well over $150 but we made ours for only $17. That’s an amazing savings!
In the early days at our old homestead, we faced the struggles of the financial challenges of homesteading. We had so many projects around the homestead that required buying expensive materials and supplies, we decided to learn how to build a 10 frame Langstroth beehive to save money.
We love a good DIY project! Whether it’s making upcycled t-shirt skirts, repurposing a canning jar into a soap dispenser or even making our own post driver for metal fence posts.
My husband is a talented wood worker so making our Langstroth beehives wasn’t too difficult for him.
Figuring out how to build a bee hive was the easy part of this DIY project, figuring out where to find affordable building materials was a whole other story!
Finding Affordable Materials to Build Langstroth Beehives
We decided to start with the most common beehive style: The Langstroth beehive.
My husband found free beehive blue prints online that showed the exact dimensions of the bee hive parts to guide the building project. Ontario Bee created this in-depth free PDF with all the nitty gritty details and measurements on how to build a Langstroth Bee Hive.
We had a few pieces of 1×8 wood but needed quite a bit more to build the bee hives.
Luckily there’s a used building material store less than half an hour from our homestead. When looking for supplies to build beehives, we made several trips in there and found enough pieces of 1x wood to build the beehive parts.
The trickiest part of sourcing second hand 1x wood is finding it without paint or stain on one side. It’s safer for the bees and the honey they produce to have untreated wood on the insides of the bee hives.
Some of the 1x wood we found was 1×6 so my husband used non-toxic wood glue and these wood dowels to piece together the smaller dimension wood to make large enough pieces to cut out sides for the beehive supers.
He used large clamps to clamp them together until the glue dried to ensure they were even and sturdy.
After the glue dried, he cut the pieces to the dimensions he needed and sanded off the excess glue dribbles so they looked nice and neat when he was done.
How We Built our 10 Frame Langstroth Beehives
We have a dovetail jig that my husband used to cut the corners of the beehive supers and fit them together. The supers are also stapled together with an industrial stapler for added durability and stability.
Notice how nice the inside of the beehive looks with the excess wood glue sanded off!
The bottom board, entrance reducer, handles and the inner cover were also made from second hand lumber material.
Some of the wood we used we found in the free pile in the alley behind a cabinet store in town. This was a great score since it was all nice hardwood lumber scraps.
Making Upcycled and Repurposed Covers for Langstroth Beehives
The covers for our beehives were made from metal we found on our property. One beehive cover is made from a piece of metal from the wall in our barn were a wood stove had been years ago.
The other beehive cover is made from a real estate sign that was left on our property and was never picked up even after we called the company several times to come pick it up.
We thought it was a great example of how to repurpose and reuse what we had on the homestead since what else do you do with an old real estate sign?!
The paint for our beehives also came from the second hand building supply store in town. The beehive supers are painted in white exterior paint with bright yellow exterior paint trim.
The pallet that our beehives sit on was also free. We eventually found a free plastic pallet to sit our beehives on and that seems to work better since the wood pallets were starting to weather and break over time.
Making Frames for a Langstroth Bee Hive
We compared prices for frames that fit in a Langstroth hive and decided it was cheaper for us to assemble the frames ourselves.
We didn’t make the beehive frames completely from scratch. We bought the unassembled frames like these that have to be assembled.
They are fairly quick and easy to assemble so definitely worth the time and effort to save a little money on building your beehive.
Save Money Building Our Own Bee Hives
We calculated that all together our beehives cost us $17 in materials to make. We purchased second hand wood and paint and the rest of the materials we found for free or repurposed.
The beehives did take my husband a lot of time to make, especially since he had to piece together smaller dimension pieces of 1x wood.
It was worth it though since my husband had the time to work on this project in his shop at night and it saved us a ton of money.
If we had bought our beehives pre-made, it would have cost us well over $150 so we saved ourselves quite a bit of money by figuring out how to build our own 10 frame Langstroth beehives.
We had so much fun with our DIY beehive project and it was well worth it for the huge money savings!
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