I built three hives from these plans this winter and just used basic 11/32" sheathing grade plywood. Two of the hives have had no issues. One hive had an issue with an exterior end panel bulging slightly in the middle. I just caulked up the gap and since it's the bottom exterior I don't think it's a serious problem. No delamination and I used two coats of a good quality exterior paint (leftovers from painting the house). Oh and I'm just west of Richmond...
I also built two swarm boxes and I did have real trouble with one of the boxes front & back panel bowing outwards. That said I hadn't had time to put metal on the roof of that box before I dropped a swarm in it so it got fairly wet with little protection this spring. I did salvage it by gluing in some supports up top to stiffen the panels & provide a frame rest. I wound up modifying that box to allow me to place it above a standard langstroth nuc box and encourage the bees to build upwards into layens frames. Looks insane but seems to be working.
My plan is to build several more hives this winter and I'll probably add some more blocking to the bottom corners of the hives. I think that will keep the exterior panels from bulging without much effect on the insulation value. With the existing plans you're just stapling/gluing the exterior panel into the end "grain" of the bottom panel so there isn't much holding power.
As far as transferring from Langstroths I only transferred one hive this year. It was a split from last year that I had just transferred into two 10 frame medium boxes. I just did a shook swarm technique with new frames and they took off. Wound up building out 12 1/2 layens frames this spring and our flow was not good. I did feed them throughout to get more wax. I also wanted to retire the old langstroth frames was so the shook swarm worked really well for me. My other layens hives are from swarms. I did not do any of techniques that involve cutting down langstroth frames or putting a shim into the layens and hanging langstroth frames.
Hello everybody,
Making plans for woodenware building this fall and would like to build a bunch of Layen Hives to experiment with next spring.
Dr. Leo's recommended hive (
http://www.horizontalhive.com/how-to-build/insulated-layens-hive.shtml) uses plywood with an insulating layer.
Can anyone provide their long term experiences using plywood in these designs ? I like the ease of building but I live in a high humidity environment and don't want them de-laminating inside and out, but I also don't want to use 2 layers of 2x lumber.