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Beehives are made up of hive boxes. In each box, there are eight to ten frames that hang between sides of the box by protruding (sticking out) tabs. The bees make their comb on both sides of the frame to store honey, nectar, and pollen. There are three sizes of hive boxes, deep, medium, and shallow. Deeps are often used at the bottom of the hive and mediums and shallows are added to the top as when the weather gets warmer and the honey season starts. During the honey flow beekeepers will often use a queen excluder to separate the top and bottom of the hive. A queen excluder is basically a grating that prevents the queen from getting to the top of the hive. Beekeepers want to stop the queen from laying eggs on the same frames that hold a lot of honey so that when they extract the honey they will kill as few bees as possible and the honey won't be contaminated. L.L. Langstroth invented the movable frame hive in 1851. Up until then beekeepers used skeps ot wooden boxs to store bees. Skeps are domes made out of wicker [see below for a picture] The disadvantage of using skeps was that the honey couldn’t be harvested without destroying the comb that the bees had made and during the rest of the year the bees couldn’t be checked on. This meant that every year the bees had to start over.