Foxhound Bee Company

Cypress Vs. Pine For Beehives

Why Use Cypress For Beehives?

Pine, cedar, poplar, and cypress are common woods used for bee hives. All woods have positives and negatives, especially when used for beekeeping equipment. In Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana, cypress and pine are both popular woods for making beehives. These two options are popular in the south because both species naturally grow there. Cedar wood is more popular in the north, where it naturally grows.

Pine is popular because it is inexpensive, grows quickly, and is easy to cut. Cypress is popular as it grows slowly in wet areas, creating a denser wood with tight growth rings. The tight rings and naturally present preservative cypressene minimizes decay, allowing cypress bee hives to last longer than any beekeeper does.

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Pine grows quickly and rots quickly; Cypress grows slowly and rots slowly

What Is Cypressene?

What makes cypress wood unique among other woods is a natural ability to produce a preservative called cypressene. The presence of this in the wood naturally slows down waters’ ability to deteriorate the wood as well as insects desire to chew through the wood. This is why cypress wood is popular for any outdoor use like fences, docks, railroad ties and beehives.

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Cypress Vs. Pine For Beekeeping

Pine Wood For Beehives

Standard beekeeping equipment in the US is made from 3/4-inch thick pine wood and is the standard wood used by most beekeeping supply companies like Mann Lake, Kelly Bees, and Dadant. The pine used for beehives and much of the lumber you see at Home Depot or Lowes is a naturally a porous wood which is good and bad. Pine is quick growing and easy to cut, which is why it is so popular with suppliers, but definitely has it’s negatives.

Quick growing pine wood means your beekeeping equipment can be cheaper, but the advantages stop there. The reason pine grows so quickly is their trunks have large channels transport sap and water up and down the trunk to support their fast growth.

Notice the wide space between growth rings in pine boards, about 5 rings per inch. Fewer rings per inch means faster growth and more porous wood.

Cypress Wood For Beehives

Cypress, on the other hand, can cost more upfront but will hold up well outside. This means that Cypress wood can easily last 50+ years when taken care of, proving a better investment in the long term. It is also a more beautiful wood to use, which may mean nothing to you. 

The bees certainly don’t care and it is used for both deep, medium boxes and honey supers.  The wood can actually be left unpainted because of cypress’ natural resistance to decay.

Cypress wood’s slow growth patterns make the wood less porous and susceptible to rot. When looking at cypress, you’ll notice the grain on the wood is much tighter and there are more growth rings per inch. 

You can compare the pictures here of pinewood and cypress wood end-grain and see the difference between the two. In the cypress wood, the tight layers are just a part of what makes cypress wood so great for beehives.

Notice the tight space between growth rings in cypress boards, about 10 per inch. Twice as dense as pine wood is in our example.

Old Growth Vs New Growth Cypress

Cypress wood first harvested today is not the same as when first harvested in the early 1900s. We know this and you will often hear “Cypress isn’t any better than pine at preventing decay because it’s not old-growth wood. That new growth wood doesn’t do jack”. Have you heard that or something along those lines? You see it a lot in social media where people like to sound off.

Old Growth Cypress Wood

The “old growth” cypress from large trees is hard to find in the wild. If harvested, the wood is so valuable it would not be turned into bee boxes. Think of old-growth cypress as the very middle of a very large cypress tree. It’s the core, the creme de la creme of cypress wood. It takes a very old, large tree to harvest “old growth” wood. And if you get it, you definitely won’t be turning it into a beehive.

Old-growth cypress wood is reserved for specialty products like veneer, luxury dashboards, and very expensive guitars.

This type of lumber has more of the cypressene in it that prevents decay and is better than new growth lumber, but the new lumber is still plenty resistant to rotting.

Cypress knees pushing up
Cypress knees pushing up from below the tree and out of the water as the tree grows

New Growth Cypress Wood

Modern cypress is called “new growth” or “second growth” cypress. However, “old growth” and “new growth” come from the same tree, Bald Cypress.

The “new growth” cypress does not have the same dense core as the giant trees from the 1900s. But because cypress grows in or near water, it is a very dense piece of wood. The water stalls the growth of the trees, creating tight growth rings and reducing the air pockets that develop during drying.

The USDA still classifies “new growth” cypress to be moderately decay resistant, moderately heavy, moderately strong, and moderately hard. Sounds like a good, affordable, long-lasting wood for bee hives. Compared side by side with pine, cypress is always much denser and stronger than pine.

New Growth Tree

The Wood We Use For Our Beehives

All of our Langstroth equipment is made from cypress wood. Our medium, deep, 10 frame, 8 frame, 5 frame beekeeping equipment is all made from Cypress. This is not only for the reasons listed above but also because we use cypress wood for our own bees. We love using our 7/8-inch cypress beehives because they work so well for us. The strength, eye appeal, and durability of our equipment are incredible. 

Neither we nor our bees were disappointed with cypress. You will not be either.

Happy Beekeeping.

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