Beekeeping Equipment

This article is taken from Five Gallon Ideas, which features over 100 uses for 5 gallon buckets with more being added all the time.

Keeping honeybees is turning into a popular cottage industry. And what’s the beekeepers best friend?

Here’s a hint: it’s also the pig and chicken keeper’s best friend, it’s plastic, and it’s 5 gallons in size.

Honey Bee Waterer

Keeping insects hydrated isn’t straightforward. If they get their bodies just a little bit wet they can freeze to death easily. Bees need a sturdy meshed platform to keep them from getting soaked.

This great little PVC pipe invention is designed to fit a 5 gallon bucket. It floats on top of the liquid – which can be just water or sugar water.

Many bee keepers will feed cheap sugar to their bees to help them survive the winter. Normally that’s what the honey is for but you’ve gone and taken all that haven’t you!

Honey Extractor

This is a triple 5 gallon bucket Honey Extractor designed to separate honey comb from that sweet sugary gold.

Comb is placed in the top bucket where it is spun rapidly, allowing honey to settle to the bottom 5 gallon bucket.

Centrifugal honey extractors like this are quite common, but this ones’ special because it’s made out cheap, accessible, 5 gallon buckets.

Make sure the buckets are food grade and you can store the honey right in the bucket.

Bee Hive

We’ve covered the 5 gallon bucket beehive before. It’s a cool idea but in its current form isn’t practical as a hive for honey bees.

It’s best to use a traditional tried and true honey bee hives.

The most popular 2 designs are the Top Bar hive and the Langstroth hives pictured below.

Top Bar Hive

This hive produces slightly less honey and much more wax. It is considered better for bee welfare than the Langstroth hive and may help prevent against mites.

Langstroth Hive

Developed in the mid 1800′s and still very widely used. A very popular hive for cottage industry beekeepers. Highly productive and relatively simple to use.

For many more ways to use 5 gallon buckets for self sufficiency, visit Five Gallon Ideas. When citing this article, please link to