Top Bar Hive - Progress

I'm loving my top bar hive. The bees seem to be loving at too. After my initial attempts to populate the hive failed I was a bit discouraged but its all go now. I've discovered a few design flaws (or design opportunities?) which I'll details a bit later.

There are two main features of the hive that increase the enjoyment for me. The first is the bees are so much calmer. I'm fairly careful about managing my queens so my bees are very calm normally anyway but being able to remove one comb at a time seems to agree with them. I assume that when a Langstroth hive is opened there is quite a draft that cools the entire hive, from bottom to top. This is not the case with the top bar. The second is no heavy lift while bending over the hive. I sit on a stool (upside down flower pot) for the duration of the inspection and can take all the time I like.

Progress

Bar 8, 24 October

Bar 8, 16 October

 These two photos were taken a week apart. The first shows the bees just starting to build on a new bar. In the second they have stopped building and start using it for pollen storage.

Bar 7, 16 October

Bar 7 also shows significant expansion. An inspection of the second photo reveals a small amount of capped honey and some freshly capped brood. These photos were taken four weeks apart. It is interesting to note how the comb shape has changed from round to matching the shape of the hive.

Bar 7, 7 November

 

Bar 9, 16 October

Bar 9, 7 November

The progress on bar 9 is more dramatic. This bar was moved from the far end of the hive to directly above the entrance on the 16th. The bees seem to have taken to the bars very readily.

Bar 9, 24 October

Design Flaws

Bowed Comb

There are two issues I have discovered so far. The first is a simple fix. The bars are grooved down the center then the groove is filled with wax. When I manufactured the bars I thought a patch of wax in the middle would be sufficient to encourage the bees to build in the correct place. This proved to be the case but once the comb was bigger than the patch of wax the bees avoided the groove, resulting in bowed combs. This has a knock on effect for the next few bars and some of the combs are overlapping bars because of this bow. This can be easily remedied by making the patch of wax larger but I don't want to encourage them to attach the combs to the side wall by making the patch too big.

The second issue is the installation of the viewing window. This is a CD case glued to the outside of the hive. This leaves a large recess in the wall, which the bees have expanded the combs into. The combs are not attached to the wall but they will not fit elsewhere in the hive. This makes it difficult to arrange the frames as I'd like, to encourage the growth of the hive. The next version will have to have another piece of window installed on the inside. I'm sure they won't complain about having double glazing installed.

Top Bar Hive Populated, 3rd time lucky

Populating my top bar hive proved to be a bit of a challenge. A standard Langstroth frame wont fit so how to convince a large handful of bees to stay put was the question.

I seemed to have achieved it as part of the move of my main hive but it was a journey. My first few attempts failed but I've learned a few things.

My first attempt was doomed to fail and I knew it when I did it but I was interested to see how the bees reacted and they, as they often do, amazed me with their ability to communicate. I had a 4 frame nuc that had lost its queen. I'm guessing she didn't come back from a mating flight. I emptied all the bees out of the nuc into the top bar hive and blocked the entrance. Half a litre of syrup was provided to make them feel welcome and they seem to appreciate it. After a day I unblocked the entrance to see what would happen. I should point out at this point that I had left the nuc where it was and the top bar was sitting next to it.

Shortly after unblocking the entrance I thought there was a swarm starting (even though they had no queen...) but it appears they held a family meeting, decided they didn't like their new house and all together took off for their old house. In the less than five minutes the top bar hive was empty and nuc was full again. How they communicated the idea to everyone all at once I don't know but it was amazing to watch.

These of photos show the sequence of events.

Confusion	Found the wax
Clustering	Gone...

Once they had all arrived back in the nuc box I left them alone for a few weeks. I then prepared the main hive for merging the nuc and was about to move the frames across when I noticed some brood. I have no idea where the queen came from as this was several months after I had placed a queen cell into the nuc and there was definitely no brood previously. One old hand suggested I had struck it lucky by receiving a queen who got lost on her mating flight.

On my next attempt I took a couple of frames and cut a block out of them. I then heated some wax and used it to stick the cut outs to the top bar. The bees seemed quite happy with this arrangement and stayed put (queen and all). They would probably still be there now if I hadn't neglected them over winter. It appears they ran out of feed and so died out. They had made one small comb on a top bar, in the perfect position, so it's a shame they didn't survive.

My third attempt follows the plan I talked about before which seems to have worked. Brushing one brood frame of bees, the one with the queen on, looks to have been sufficient. I took this photo just a few minutes ago by removing some of the top bars at the far end of the hive and poking the camera in. You can see the container if syrup (which I keep topping up) sitting on the mesh at the bottom. The top bars are covered with some rubber carpet underlay and I could feel the heat rising out of the hive when I lifted it. I'm hoping that when I inspect them this weekend there is some brood or eggs and they have started some new comb.

Hive Two - Second Inspection and some plans

Hive two now consists of 2 full depth, one .75 and a queen excluder. Its too big for my small yard now and I now have two young boys running around in the garden so the chances of bees getting squashed by them is increasing. They don't like being stung either...

I still want to try my hand at breeding a quantity of queens but I plan to use the top bar hive for that. The top bar hive still isn't populated. I did have it populated but they died out over winter. More on this in a later post...

There is a community garden just a few blocks away from where I live. They sound keen to have a hive there so I plan to move hive two onto their land. Because it is so close normally I'd have to move the bees twice. Once to a temporary location more than 5km away and then move them to their final location a few weeks later. This is because the bees are extremely good at navigating but forget to check where home is when they leave so if I move the hive a short distance the bees will take off in the morning, recognise the area they are in and so return to the old site.

To overcome this I plan to do the following

1. Breed a new queen in hive two
2. When the queen is almost ready to hatch move the current queen and some workers into the Top Bar Hive. If I do a graft today they should be almost capped next weekend (7.5 days) so next Sunday might be the time to make the move. Taking that into account, I won't do the graft today.
3. At the same time move Hive two aside and place the Top Bar Hive in its place
4. Move Hive two to its new location, about 1km away.

This should mean that any of Hive two's field bees that return to the old location will find their way into the Top Bar Hive, boosting its population. Any new field bees, heading out on their first flight, will orientate themselves based on the new location and return there.

In preparation for this I have located Hive two's queen and isolated her to the bottom box. I've also placed my queen rearing frame into the hive so that the bees can prepare it for a graft.

The hive is brimming with bees, every frame was reasonably well covered in bees, right out to the side walls. I weighed the top box (the .75) as I thought it would be interesting to see how quickly its weight increases. It is currently 16kg. This includes all the bees in the box at the time, 9 frames, a couple of frames of almost capped nectar and the remainder brood.

I've yet to see any significant varroa activity this season. I inserted a drone frame during the last inpection and it is almost all drawn out now. There was some brood in it but its not capped yet. Drone take about 14 days from capping to emerge so I want to remove the frame some time in the next two weeks. I spotted one worker with a mite on its back but otherwise all seems good. I still have put a sticky board in the mesh to see what the mite drop is, I really should get on to that.

Top Bar Hive - Reasons Why

Top Bar Hives seem to be surfacing as a good alternative to the Langstroth hive, more so for the hobbyist than for commercial operations. This post details some of the reasons why and takes a look at my initial attempt at building.

Some of the advantages of a top bar hive (TBH) that I have seen in various publications are

1. Simple to build, as opposed to the complex frames of the Langstroth
   True, although the design is very well understood now and pre-made parts of readily available
2. Much less disturbance of the colony
   This is the feature I am most interested in. The hive can be opened without creating a chimney that quickly cools the hive. It is also theoretically possible to inspect the brood nest without disturbing the storage and vice versa. I'm not sure yet, as I have only just populated my hive, whether this is practical as I can visualise the top bars being fairly well stuck together after a long period of with no inspections
3. Harvesting honey is simpler, though more destructive
   I picture harvesting the honey with a bucket and a brush. Simply brush the bees off, then cut the comb off the top bar and drop it into the bucket. It should be possible to make an escape board to fit a top bar hive but I'll wait and see if its needed.
4. The combs and cells are the size the bees want, not the size of the manufactured foundation
5. Very little off season storage required
   No supers to store, closing a hive for winter should just involve sliding a separator into the hive, at the end of the brood area.
6. Less chance of transferring diseases like AFB
   As no frames are removed and stored then redistributed there should be very little transfer of materials between hives. It is still possible to boost the population of one TBH with a comb of brood from another hive, but that is easily kept track of.

There are many designs of TBH, I chose to base mine on the design at www.biobees.com because it detailed the dimensions and provided a simple method. Much of the material I read suggested that the dimensions are quite critical and vary from species to species so using existing research made sense.

I bought some native timber tongue and groove from a demolition firm (for the body of the hive) and some untreated boxing timber for the top bars. The base is some fibreglass fly screen and the lid is just a frame made with some tongue and groove and black plastic. I intend to bend some galvanised iron on to it at some point but the plastic will do for now. I've also but some carpet underlay between the roof and top bars to provide some insulation.

This is the finished product with a house warming gift for the new occupants. The black square on the side is a CD case that is glued in place and can be opened to peer inside (more on this in a later post). On the right you can see the landing area and the hive with no top bars. I'm not sure that putting the entry perpendicular to the combs is a good idea but I'm sure I'll find out soon enough.

You can see the fly screen secured to the bottom of the hive in this upside down photo. The intention is to cut a board that will cover the fly screen material in winter to reduce drafts.

The top bars are untreated boxing timber ripped down to the correct width (see the plans at biobees) and then a groove is sawn to a depth of 2mm up the center. I've then melted some wax and pored a patch in the middle to encourage the bees to build their combs in the 'correct' place. The correct place being where I want them to build the combs.

In a later post I'll cover the trials I had getting the bees to stay, but I think I've solved that problem now. All that remains to be seen is whether they will survive the winter.