The top bar hive is an excellent
way to make comb honey sections. The
bees do all the hard work of drawing new comb; without the need to put in any
thin foundation. You just need to remove
the top bar with comb and cut out the comb honey section. Remember that comb honey is considered exotic
and sells for about twice that of extracted honey (provided you don’t flood the
market).
However, the top bar hive does have several
drawbacks. The foremost is the tendency
of the bees to attach the comb to the angled sides of the hive. Do to this difficulty of pulling the comb,
the beekeeper tends to inspect the top bar hive less often or not at all! In addition, populating a new top bar hive requires
either a package of bees or a captured swarm.
Trying to populate a top bar hive with bees from a Langstroth hive, while
possible, is a challenge, because you need to shake bees from the Langstroth
frames into the top bar hive.
After reading an article in
American Beekeeping Journal about horizontal hives, I have decided to address
these issues by building a hybrid top bar hive this winter. Instead of the angled sides I have retained
the vertical sides of the Langstroth hive.
In addition, instead of the top bar I have sized the hive to use standard
9 5/8 inch Langstroth style frames. In essence this is a horizontal Langstroth
hive. A hive length of approximately 5
feet would be the equivalent of a vertical Langstroth hive with two 9 5/8 inch
deeps (the normal brood chamber) and four 6 5/8 inch medium supers. There
will space for about 40 frames. That
volume should accommodate most hive colonies except a really booming
colony. If its a booming colony you can easily
pull several capped frames and give them empty replacements to abort their inclination to swarm.
To populate the hive I can simply take a split
from a standard Langstroth hive. I have
the choice of letting the bees raise their own queen, adding a queen cell or
using mated queen. The frames from the split
are placed at the end of the hive with the entrance. The bees naturally keep the brood nest close
to the entrance. Conversely the bees use
the frames far from the entrance for honey storage. No queen excluder is required.
For my first year with this hive
I will start with twenty (20) 9 5/8 inch
frames with foundation. About six of
these frames will come from the split.
Then will come fourteen (14) frames with new foundation. These first 20 frames will always be left for
the bee colony at honey harvest time, so that they have sufficient winter
stores (this is the same as two (2) deeps).
The next 20 frames will be foundationless. I have experimented with foundationless
frames in the past year with good success.
The bees can easily draw out a frame in less than a week during the
honey flow. Being foundationless these
frames can then be cut up for comb honey.
This hybrid hive
can be constructed at a lower cost than a standard Langstroth hive because you
need not buy the bottom board, excluder, four super bodies, inner cover,
telescoping cover and the foundation for about 50% of the frames. So far, I have spent $30 for the 5 pieces of 1”
X 12” X 6’ pine boards used to construct the box itself. Another $8 or so will be necessary for
plywood for the top cover. It also
provides a therapeutic winter project for those beekeepers that are also
woodworkers
This arrangement will allow for
easy removal of brood frames for periodic inspection without the hassle of the
foundation being attached to the top bar hive side walls.
Here are a few photos of the
hive. I will report on its progress
throughout next summer and next winter. Winter will be the big test to see if the bees will move horizontally to their winter stores.
Another view of hive showing frames at one end and single frames at 20 and 30 frame points
Very interesting. Thanks for sharing. I would have thought that 30 frames is sufficient for one hive. I was thinking 40 frames for a double queen colony. How did you make out? Any issues with swarm management?
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