Top Bar Hive

Apart from worrying about the bees, winter is a time to catch up with jobs that haven't been done and to prepare for the coming season and something I have been working on is my Top Bar Hive.

A couple of years ago I attended a meeting where a local bee keeper gave a talk on the work he did with an organisation called Bees for Development.Their main work is in training young African bee keepers who would then go to small rural villages and teach bee keeping to provide an alternative cash crop. Information on BfD can be found here.

Apart from the good work they do, the thing I found very interesting was the type of bee hive they use in Africa.
European hives are mostly a series of boxes stacked on top of each other but African hives are essentially a trough where the colony expands horizontally rather than vertically.
Although Western bee hives are hardly a piece of space age design, they do depend on a degree of fairly precise manufacture and also need a fair of wood to build then, resources that are in short supply in remote African villages.
The TBH is therefore simple to make and does away with the numerous wooden frames in a Western hive by having a series of bars laying on the hive and the bees than build the comb down from them.
You can download plans from the interwebnet but my woodworking skills are limited to deciding how big a hammer to hit things with. A new TBH is a bit expensive but I eventually bought a second hand one off eBay for £40 and I made some legs for it and an observation window.
My first attempt at populating is was with a very scrawny swarm that eventually expired.


Last winter the woodpeckers made a total mess of the thing and the hive bowed in the middle. The walls were probably too thin and they buckled, the bars weren't supported by the side walls and I kind of wrote it off.

However I've decided to resurrect it and the first stage was to try and fill the holes with strips of wood and wood putty.
To cure the bulging I have put a straining bar through the hive and tightened the nuts on each end until the side walls are roughly straight and the bars don't fall into the hive.

Some of the bars have been damaged by the woodpeckers but there are enough left to support a reasonable sized colony.
The bars have slots in them and to give the bees a starting point you can either put a lolly stick or small strip of foundation in the slot. I am also going to attach a piece of drawn out come to a couple of the bars to give the queen somewhere to lay eggs.

Although I could hope to get a swarm next year I am going to play safe and buy what is called a package of bees. Normally if you buy a colony they come on convention frames but as these don't fit in a TBH, a package is probably easier to install. What you get is a box of 'loose' bees with a laying queen in a small cage. The bees are then emptied into the hive and the queen cage put in the hive for a couple of days before being the queen is released.
The package has been ordered now and wll be delivered around April time.

TBH's are now a bit trendy although conventional bee keepers can be a bit dismissive of them and I was advised to 'get rid of it and get a proper hive'.
They are often used by  'natural' bee keepers as they are perceived to be more bee friendly I suspect due in part because they recreate an environment similar to a hollowed out log where bees often set up a colony in the wild

Recently they got a bit of publicity when Monty Don of Gardeners World suggested new bee keepers used them.
Although he seems a reasonable bloke, unfortunately some of his comments about bees and bee keeping were stupid and ill informed which is surprising as he is a Patron of Bees for Development.

A definite advantage of TBH's is that they are much easier to handle than conventional hives.
A full super of honey can weigh 50 lbs and its no joke lugging these around. However with a TBH you just have to handle one frame at a time making them suitable for people with back problems. However you have to be very careful handling the frames. A conventional hive has an enclosed frame with wire in the foundation enabling you to swivel the frame in front of you to see either side of the frame. The comb in a TBH is just suspended from the top bar with no strengthening and its easy to break it off.
Also honey extraction is a pain. Because the hive doesn't have wooden frames you can't spin them in an extractor and you have to cut the comb away, melt it, let it cool and then take the wax off to get the honey.For me this isn't an issue as I am not interested in getting honey from the hive and have other hives to produce honey for markets.
 Some of the varroa treatments are more difficult in a TBH but 'natural' bee keepers wouldn't use chemicals anyway and treat varroa with what is called a 'sugar shake' - essentially covering the bees with icing sugar that makes the bees clean themselves knocking the mites off.