From building custom Layens hives to discovering what really matters in beekeeping
Jon has been planning for beekeeping for years. Starting in his early 60’s, he realized he needed to plan for a hobby that would last 20 or more years. He researched different hive types, looking for a balance of long-term sustainability for him and what would best serve his bees.
Not in the romantic sense of golden honey flows and perfect spring days. In the practical sense of how many 100-pound boxes he wants to be lifting when he's 75.
This calculation led him down a path familiar to many long-term beekeepers: horizontal hives. Deep frames. Better insulation. Anything that reduces the physical toll while improving conditions for the bees.
By his third year of beekeeping, he was running 27 hives across multiple systems. He'd spent a year researching before even starting. He'd built six Layens hives himself - those Ukrainian/French horizontal beauties with 16-inch deep frames and better insulation than standard equipment.
He loved everything about them. The deep frames let queens lay in perfectly circular brood patterns instead of those inverted half-moons you see in shallower frames. Thermodynamically more efficient. The horizontal design meant less heavy lifting during inspections.
Better for bees, better for him. It was just what he was looking for. He also kept bees in top bar and Langstroth hives. The horizontal hives were easy on his back. And he noticed that the colonies in his Layens hives, made of thicker wood than standard hives, overwintered more easily than his other colonies, needing less treatment and feeding. His strategy was working and he became a fan of well-insulated hives and deeper frames.
Then he walked past the Primal Bee booth at the North American Honey Bee Expo.
The builder who bought instead of building
"I'd never seen a frame that deep," Jon says. "And the insulation was certainly compelling."
He talked with Gianmario and Alex about thermal management. About what happens when you take that burden off the bees' shoulders. When they're not burning calories just to maintain hive temperature - calories that come from nectar that they would preferably be storing as honey.
Jon thought about it. He's a builder. Everything in his apiary, he's made himself.
"I decided I wasn't going to buy one. I thought I could go home and make something like this."
That night at dinner in Louisville, his wife had other thoughts.
"She says, 'Why don't you just buy one of the damn things?'" Jon laughs. "It was literally my wife's idea to get the show special."
The late swarm test
By the time he received his first Primal Hive, it was a little later in the season andJon didn't want to split an existing colony into the new hive. He wanted to catch a swarm - bees that come out hungry to build comb, already adapted to local conditions.
He caught a swarm for testing in the new hive in mid June. Late in the season, it was small, possibly a secondary swarm. It was the kind of swarm that he might have just combined with another colony, but he thought it would be a good challenge for his new hive.
He installed them on wax foundation, and, using the insulated follower board that came with the Primal Hive, he gave them a compact space of 4 frames to work with. Entering the summer dearth, he fed them thin sugar water with nutrients to stimulate comb building.
"They did great. They really did great."
At that point, Jon wasn't expecting to see the real benefits of the insulation. He assumed that would reveal itself over winter - less die-off, less food consumption. He planned to keep careful track.
Then summer hit South Carolina with a four-week drought and high temperatures that didn't quit.
What happens when nobody's home
"The dirt was just baking," Jon says. "We didn't have anything going on for foraging. There was nothing for the bees to get."
Most of his hives were fighting an uphill battle against the heat. He could see it clearly - hundreds bees in the air along the flight path to the pond, grabbing water and hauling it back to spray on combs. Fanning frantically. Using evaporation and their own energy to cool the hive.
Nothing to eat in the wild. All these bees working hard, burning calories, having to come back and consume stored resources just to keep the hive from cooking.
Jon looked over at his Primal Bee hive.
At this point, it probably had 7,000-8,000 bees. Growing nicely but nowhere near full strength - maybe a third of what it would be with a full year of development.
He saw almost nothing coming in and out of the entrance.
"I thought something happened. This hive had been very active, and now they're not doing anything."
He expected to open it and find maybe some stragglers. Maybe wax moth damage. The usual carnage of a collapsed colony.
Instead, he found three frames of bees - those super deep frames holding a lot of bees - staring at him very quietly.
Just humming along.
"That really kind of blew my mind."
The data confirms what the bees knew
Jon went out and got hygrometers. He installed one above the brood nest in the Primal Bee, one in his Layens hive, one in his top bar hive, and one in a Langstroth hive.
He started tracking temperature fluctuations over time.
During those peak heat wave days, the data was clear. "There was just so much less up and down with the Primal Bee hive."
And remember - this colony only had about a third of the bee population he'd expect in a mature hive.
"Basically less power inside the hive to manage temperature and humidity. They can affect it very locally around themselves, but the rest of the hive is kind of acting as a lot of thermal area."
The other hives were working overtime. The Primal Bee colony was sitting inside while the weather did what it wanted outside.
"They're just not feeling the heat like these other guys are. It's not radiant heat coming into this. What they're capable of doing with just moving air around seems to be doing fine for them."
Jon reached out to the team. "I said, 'Hey, I just saw my first cool thing about Primal Bee hives.'"
He's seen it a couple more times since. Hot day, everybody else is out working, and "these guys were just sitting in there chilling, waiting for something to bloom."
Going into winter strong
How are they doing now?
"Really good."
The colony has plenty of food. Jon's continuing to feed a bit - some sugar on top - because he doesn't know exactly what they'll need through the winter. His hope is that when they come out of their cluster, they'll start making more comb.
"They're strong and they're very chill."
Part of that is genetics - Jon doesn't keep mean bees in his yard. But part of it is something else.
"What I've noticed is that bees that are not stressed are less defensive. Maslow's hierarchy, I guess. They have their shelter, they have their food, they have their basic needs met."
No concerns about them making it through winter. In fact, Jon's already bought a second Primal Bee hive, sitting and waiting for spring.
"I'll put a really big swarm in there, and that thing should really cook."
The unexpected benefit: no back pain required
Jon's original motivation was avoiding heavy lifting. The irony is that the Primal Bee hive delivered on that goal in an unexpected way.
"What I'm finding is it actually does manage a lot like a horizontal hive in that I don't have to do heavy lifting just to look at the bees."
Sure, he'll need to lift honey supers during nectar flows. He opted for the medium supers to make the lifting easier. “But there is no tearing the whole hive apart, especially the brood nest, just to inspect for health and queen activity. When he needs to inspect the brood nest, he can see the entire vertical nest by just standing at the top and lifting out the long frames.
Like his horizontal hives the top of the Primal Hive brood box is at his belt level - no bending over to examine the bottom boxes. “Opening hives level with my waist let’s me work most of the season in a bee jacket and shorts. Even when they’re agitated, the bees never see my legs, so they don't sting me down there. I’m the only beekeeper around here I know who does inspections in shorts. It’s a lot cooler. I got used to that with my Layens and top bar hives, so it’s great that I can do that with the Primal Hive too.”
If this was a Langstroth, he'd have two brood boxes to inspect separately. Lift the top, inspect, put it back together, take it off, go into the bottom box. All that bending and lifting he's trying to avoid.
"This actually lets me do this. This gets me probably 80% of the way to what I'm looking for in a horizontal hive."
The production calculation
Jon loves building equipment. It's part of the hobby for him.
But he's doing some math.
"One of the things they've been joking about here is that if this does what they say in terms of honey production and ease of keeping bees, I'd be an idiot to keep building hives."
Right now, 17 hives sit in the same apiary as his single Primal Bee.
"Those 17 hives won't make as much honey as three or four of these hives are likely to."
The reason is straightforward: the vertical structure and thermal management of the Primal Bee system benefits honey production but with the inspection ease of horizontal systems. Reusable comb. Less energy wasted on temperature regulation.
"If I were starting from scratch, I'd probably start with two or three or four of these hives."
What new beekeepers need to know
Jon's careful about endorsing products. He's a lifelong educator, active on forums, gives talks. He enjoys talking to beekeepers - "they're funny people in a great way, and sometimes in a difficult way. Beekeepers learn what works for them and we can become stubbornly attached to those ways. I’m still in the early learning phases and trying to stay open to all ideas."
But he's quite prepared to get behind this product.
"What I've seen so far is really, really encouraging. Nothing that I've seen has done anything except cement my belief that extremely insulated hives and deep frames are good all year round, and not just in cold climates. A key learning for me has been the effect of high insulation during summer months. It makes sense… a thick tree trunk doesn’t just give insulation benefits in the winter either."
For someone starting out, the Primal Bee hive offers something most alternative systems don't: compatibility with the beekeeping community's existing knowledge.
"Everyone in the bee clubs that these people are gonna run into is gonna understand the verticalness of it because that’s a key honey and brood making feature of standard hives. And, the spacing between the bars is like standard hives, so most of the products designed for standard hives should also work in the Primal Hive, so they'll all be able to speak the same language."
Plus, you’ll get all the benefits of proper thermal management.
"If it's helping the bees get the best environment they can have without having to manage it thermally as much, their bees are going to be healthier, they're going to get better yields, they're going to have more successes."
The bottom line
Jon hasn't seen a full season yet. He's waiting for spring to see how the colony emerges, how they handle mites, how that second hive performs with a strong swarm from day one.
But what he has seen changed his calculations.
During the worst heat wave of summer, when every other colony in his yard was burning energy and resources just to survive, a small colony of 7,000 bees sat quietly in their super-insulated hive with deep frames and stable temperatures.
They weren't working harder. They weren't stressed. They were just waiting for something to bloom.
That's not normal colony behavior during a heat wave. That's better.
And for a beekeeper thinking about the next 20 years - thinking about how many boxes he wants to lift and how many bees he wants to lose to preventable stress - better is exactly what he's looking for.
Jon is a hobbyist beekeeper in South Carolina going into his fourth year of managing colonies. He runs 22 hives across multiple systems including Layens, top bar, and Langstroth hives, and coordinates a beekeeping program at a local school. After spending a year researching horizontal hives and thermal management, he tested his first Primal Bee hive during the 2025 season. He's currently preparing for his first winter with the system and has purchased a second hive for spring installation.
