In Slovenia, Beekeeping Is Sacred–and Key for a Sustainable Food System

Think of how much knowledge of the environment that we rely on to survive has been lost. Yea we’ve achieved a lot of amazing things, I won’t discount that, but our incentives could be better aligned with respecting and ameliorating, if not preserving, the “natural” world.

It's nice to see that they do call out the AŽ hive, it's a super interesting design.

It has a few advantages over the Langstroth hive that is overwhelmingly the default. Obviously the benefits aren't without cost, because otherwise it would be more common commercially.

The basic difference between a Langstroth and AŽ hives is how frames are removed. In a Langstroth hive, a hive is made by stacking some number of boxes, each box containing some number (usually 8 or 10) of frames (a frame is the thing that contains each comb of brood or honey). To remove or exam the frames in a hive, the frames must be removed by lifting them out of the top of the box they're in. As the hive is created stacking boxes, examining the full hive requires lifting entire boxes from the top of the hive to access the boxes beneath.

An AŽ hive is constructed a single box, that is multiple frames high. The back of the hive opens much like a cupboard, providing access to the full hive. Access to the frames is achieved by having them slide back out of the hive.

The benefits of the AŽ hive derive from this mode of access - a full box of honey frames can weight 30+ lbs, so lifting them can be challenging. Simply opening a door and sliding frames out is clearly easier. Because the hives aren't accessed from the top they can be stacked. Finally (and my favorite) because they are accessed from the back people can make small huts (often on trailers) where one "wall" is made out of many hives. Subsequent examination and management can be performed in a comfortable little cabin - this makes it easier to maintain a warmer temperature and allows examination in cold or wet weather. Some people claim that the not needing to deconstruct the hive causes less stress on bees, but I don't know of actual research on the matter.

There are downsides, the hives cost more than Langstroth, and they are less efficient overall: there's functionally a maximum size a hive can be relative to the swarm, after which they cannot keep it sufficiently warm and will leave. The design of AŽ hives means they can't be expanded (Langstroth hives can be expanded by putting another box on the top), and so are limited by the relatively small size of a new swarm. This means keeping the same number of bees will require a greater number of hives, reducing the space efficiency, and increasing the amount of harvested pollen + honey that goes into maintaining the hive rather than being harvestable.

There are other advantages and disadvantages, but these are the things I remember.

I tried to find a useful resource but most of the google first page hits are companies selling them, or that are clearly super biased as to how awesome they are, but this one seemed to at least have a good set of pictures showing how they can be set up and aren't actively trying to sell them: https://www.heathwing.com/slovenian-beehouse