Since the Civil War era, most beekeepers, we at The Chronicle included, keep bees in stacked wooden boxes called Langstroth hives.

The simple design is named after the Rev. Lorenzo Lorraine Langstroth of Pennsylvania, who was the first to figure out that if you place frames 1/4 to 5/16 of an inch apart in a box, a bee colony will build orderly sheets of honeycomb instead of a Gaudi-esque maze.

Little has changed to the painted white hive design. But ever since we put two beehives on the roof of the Chronicle Building in 2011, we have been hearing whispers in the beekeeping community about a Sonoma County beekeeper with Yoda-like status named Serge Labesque who is making a better beehive.

"When I started keeping bees in the late '90s, I realized that the standard equipment is really terrible for bees," said Labesque, in his soft-spoken French accent. He keeps about 60 hives, most at the family-run Oak Hill Farm in Glen Ellen.

"The standard boxes are a moisture and heat trap," he said.

Labesque, whose organic approach to beekeeping is to replicate what bees do in nature with minimal human intrusion and no chemicals, set about designing a hive that emulates the trees that bees have been living in for 45 million years.

"We manipulate the species without realizing it's a wild species, and we are mishandling it," he said. "We need to be stewards and provide nest cavities that keep it wild."

Something different

Even from a distance, you can see there's something different about his hives. Instead of painting them white, he puts paint just on the corners of each hive box to seal the seams. Bees need their hive to stay about 94 degrees for brood to develop, and they regulate temperature by fanning at the entrance or balling together for warmth. Unpainted wood hives "breathe" like a tree, Labesque says, so in hot weather they can bring the temperature down faster. In cold weather, the moisture can escape. When Labesque wants to provide more insulation, he fills a top feeder with sprigs of lavender.

Using the same logic, Labesque makes curved, carbon fiber "awnings" to provide shade over the hive entrance. Labesque has measured temperatures of 120 degrees on the leader boards where bees stand and fan their wings to cool the hive. The bees struggle, pulling intense hot air into the hive as they are trying to cool it.

To show the difference, Labesque removed an awning from one hive for just a couple minutes. The hive was noticeably hotter to the touch, and the buzz of the bees rose in reaction to the missing awning.

"They are getting angry," Labesque said, slipping the shade cover back onto small hooks that hold it in place.

Labesque's adaptations are mimicked by many of his beekeeping students at Santa Rosa Junior College, and the crowds of devoted followers who come to his many lectures throughout Sonoma and Marin counties. He finally had to stop producing awnings for people because it was taking too much time away from his bees.

Southwest France

Labesque came to Sonoma in 1979 from Gascony, in southwest France, to be with his new wife. A custom fabricator, Labesque's mind is design-oriented. As a director at Kreysler & Associates, he worked on restoring the Ferry Building, the Flood Building and the art installation "Cupid's Span" on the Embarcadero.

His first brush with beekeeping came in the late '90s, when a neighbor wanted to get rid of his hive and asked Labesque if he might want it.

"I fell in love immediately," Labesque said.

"Observing their life, learning about their world, was like discovering a novel, each chapter was something totally new."

Probably the most unconventional aspect of a Labesque hive is what he does with the frames inside. He violates "bee space," Langstroth's central tenet that the frames must be placed a certain width apart to guide orderly comb making.

Labesque mills his own wood for his 10-frame hives. But he doesn't put 10 frames inside them. He uses eight, or seven, or six, or whatever he feels the bees need. Because bees like to build comb vertically - think tree again - Labesque fills the center of each hive box with a smaller number of frames, then uses solid placeholders, called follower boards, as bookends around the frames of comb. He bunches everything together in the center of the box, leaving several-inch gaps between the frames and the walls of the hive.

"Before I did it this way, I'd open the hive in the morning and the walls would be all wet with moisture," Labesque said.

Now, the warm air from the bee nest rises to the tops of the frames, and circulates down through the cooler gaps. The entire hive temperature stays more evenly moderated, and dry.

No colony collapse

Colony collapse does not knock on Labesque's door. He's never come to the bee yard and discovered that one of his colonies has mysteriously disappeared. Some of the hives are weaker than others, and like all beekeepers he has battles with mites. But when a hive is weakening, he doesn't do what many beekeepers do and try to save it by swapping in new frames of brood from a more robust hive.

"If we regenerate failing colonies, we are passing on bad genetic traits, and weakening the entire species," he said.

Labesque says his changes to the Langstroth hive are just design tricks. He doesn't want new beekeepers to get so caught up in the gadgetry that they miss the overall message - pay attention to your bees so you understand what they need for their particular environment, and how to provide it with minimal intrusion.

"Bees are wonderful animals because they live without preying on anybody," he said. "They are not even part of the food chain. They go out there and take nectar, pollen, water and propolis, stuff that would go to waste, and give it back to us as gifts. They save us, because 80 percent of plants you see require their pollination.

"We just need to stay out of their way."

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Meredith May is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer and beekeeper. E-mail: mmay@sfchronicle.com