Choosing the Best Hive Tools For Better Hive Health

Whether beekeepers use a piece of equipment for one season or year-round, they will gather many tools and accessories as they continue the hobby.

Smokers and many hand tools are mainly used for hive inspections, while equipment for frames and foundation keep them sturdy.

If you want to dive deeper into more beekeeping activities, queen rearing and swarm capture tools are readily available to order.

Dadant also offers specialty hive and honey moving tools to make transporting hives, nucs, and package bees easier.

Hand Tools & Smokers

Dadant offers a variety of hand tools and smokers.

Hand Tools

At Dadant, we offer a variety of hand tools for hive inspections and honey harvesting tasks.

Hive Tool: This may be one of the most important tools for a hive inspection. Beekeepers use this to separate brood boxes, supers, and frames that were stuck together with propolis. We offer classic hive tools and Italian hive tools.

Bee Brush: Brush bees away from the edges before adding a box or placing the inner and outer cover on the hive.

Uncapping tools: These tools are used exclusively for honey harvesting. We offer a variety of these tools, including uncapping forks, uncapping scratchers, uncapping rollers, electric uncapping knives, and more.

Smoker

Beekeepers use smokers to distract honey bees as they inspect the hive. All smokers perform the same job. Choosing a smoker ultimately comes down to personal preference.

To light a smoker, add smoker fuel and light it. Smoker fuel comes in different materials, including cotton, burlap, and wood pellets. At Dadant, we recommend cotton fuel because it produces non-toxic, cool white smoke for bees, and it is the easiest to light.

Hive inspections help beekeepers determine the health of their hive at a given moment. Learn how to perform your first hive inspection here.

Frames & Foundation Hardware

We offer a variety of frames and foundation hardware that beekeepers use for different tasks. For example, brass eyelets and frame wires keep frames and wax foundation together. Frame grips are used to move frames out of active hives for inspections.

Swarm Capture

Capturing swarms is an exciting beekeeping activity to add more hives to your apiary. To put it simply, create a bait hive with a nuc box or additional super, add attractive bait inside the box, and set it up in a high place.

If you put it in a tree as many other beekeepers do, be extra cautious. Climbing trees is a dangerous activity, especially when you take down your bait hive once it’s filled with bees.

As a beekeeper, you may receive calls from family, friends, and neighbors about a swarm of bees in a surprising location. Fortunately, you may already have the tools needed to capture the swarm and place it in a new hive. Prepare for this task by grabbing a nuc box and your beekeeper suit.

Queen Rearing

Queen rearing is an advanced beekeeping hobby that requires special boxes and tools. The best time to raise queen honey bees is during the spring and summer.

We offer an easy-to-use complete queen system to streamline the process, as well as a variety of other special beekeeping tools that will raise healthy queens.