When I first read about Warre hives, the quilt box was perhaps my favorite part. It simply made so much sense --- insulating the hive from summer heat and winter cold while also soaking up moisture from dehydrating nectar.

Unfortunately, in practice, the quilt box has given me a neverending string of trouble. First of all, there's the fact that in our humid climate, I'd have to change the straw every week if I wanted it to actually sop up the hive's moisture. Then there's the fact that ants like to live up in the quilt and raid honey from the bees below.

Meanwhile, our bees don't seem to like the quilt box either. When I used the fabric- or burlap-lined quilt boxes that came with our hive, the bees gnawed right through. Then when I converted over to moderately impenetrable window screening, the bees instead propolized the entire screen...and glued it to the frames below for the sake of completeness. That was a hard top to pry off!

So I'm changing gears yet again, filling the quilt box with layers of styrofoam this time around. I'm hoping the synthetic material will insulate the hive without providing such an ant-friendly habitat. And, if the insulation works, I'll probably put a solid wooden bottom on the quilt box as well. Perhaps Langstroth knew what he was doing after all....