here's David Heaf's page that includes decent plans for building a Warré hive. there are links for metric and imperial plans in the top right corner.
the internal dimensions of Oscar Perone's design are 57 x 57 x 57 cm for the brood chamber, and 57 x 57 x 10 cm for the three honey supers. the comb grid bars are 24 mm wide with 9 mm between them.
plans for horizontal top bar hives are far from standardized, but it seems like plans are easy to come by. I've never built one of these.
I can't speak much to Langstroth hives or components except that they are still the most common in the U.S. by far, and are likely relatively easy to come by used in many parts of the country. buying used has its risks, though, some quite serious. apart from the frames, building a Langstroth hive would not be difficult unless box joints were desired. even then, box joint jigs are available to buy or could be fabricated and would make the job relatively simple.
do you know which style hive you would like to use?
once you've got a hive (or several), you've got a few options for populating it. my favorite is to find and collect a swarm locally. many in the bee keeping establishment would recommend against this, and if one share's their philosophy of beekeeping, their reasons may have some traction. I don't share that philosophy.
local swarms are more likely to be adapted to local conditions; they are a coherent biological unit and establish in a hive quickly; apart, perhaps from fuel for transportation, they are free. the main disadvantage, from my point of view, is uncertainty. if you like this option, contact your local beekeepers association about getting on their swarm list. contact local pest control businesses about referrals when they get honey bee swarm calls. contact animal control, fire departments, health departments, police, anybody who might get called when a swarm shows up and scares somebody. put up ads on craigslist. put up
cards in local businesses.
then there's buying bees. sometimes folks retiring from beekeeping will
sell populated hives, but it doesn't happen enough to count on it. when I do cutouts, I usually sell the colony in a hive, and I occasionally sell hives with a swarm moved in. you could certainly check around your area to see if anybody is doing something like that, but I wouldn't count on it.
more common options are buying a package/shook swarm and buying a nucleus colony. a nucleus colony, or nuc, is usually sold on five Langstroth combs, though the occasional supplier will sell them in a Warré box (maybe only in France). this, of
course, presents a problem if you're using any hive other than a Langstroth.
see here for one way around that. apart from lack of local adaptation and the negative aspects of conventional breeding, one disadvantage I see follows from the way nucs are created. generally, two to five frames of comb are removed from an existing colony and placed into a nucleus box with whatever bees remain on the comb. either a queen is introduced, or the bees are left to raise their own queen using one or several recently laid eggs in the comb. this is an artificial form of increase. the bees did not swarm on their own, and the nucleus is not likely to be made up of the best mix of bees to start a new colony. but nucs do work just fine for plenty of people.
package bees are another option. the most obvious disadvantage there is that there's generally some dodgy work involved introducing a the queen to the rest of the package, though packages also share the disadvantages of nucs. bee packages are also called shook swarms, because they're generally made up by shaking bees off of frames into a container. the bees are often from more than one colony, so won't necessarily be related at all. a captive bred queen is often included, and she is also not likely to have any relation to the other bees. again, packages work fine, and are a well-established means of starting colonies. I just don't personally care for them.
depending on supply/demand, location, and genetics, packages and nucs can cost anywhere from around $30 to over $150. remember, capturing a swarm is generally free, and it's a lot of fun.
keep asking more questions. I do get carried away, but I hope I gave you at least a little bit of useful information.
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