What's a Top Bar Hive? and why I want one (bees part two)

guest post by Abigail Miller

"Ahem.  You know you were going to produce at least one more beekeeping post …"

Well, erm, yes …   I guess Robin's been keeping track ;-)

Quick progress report on my bees:  seem to be thriving, but I harvested no honey this ferocious hot, dry summer*. All the flowers turned into crisps early in June, so the bees could reap very little nectar and pollen. I have been feeding sugar syrup since July, also pollen substitute.

In spite of a frigid week of sleet and snow in February, they seemed to be building up well, with several frames of growing brood. I was hoping to split the hive in two in April. But in March I did a major rearrangement, including forcing the queen off of her favored home brood frames into a new shallower, lighter-weight brood box. This was ultimately successful, but I think it really upset her. When I went into the hive a month later to do the split, there just wasn't enough brood to do it safely. So I entered the summer with one good-sized hive, not two smaller ones. Maybe a good thing, as the summer turned out.

My hive is the U.S. standard Langstroth type.** I started with a deep brood box and two shallow (5-3/4", much less heavy) supers for honey. Wanting to get all my frames the same size, I have now managed to convert to four medium-depth (6-5/8") boxes, two on the bottom for brood and two above in summer for honey.

Since these boxes when full are still quite heavy, my new as-yet-untenanted hive, waiting for the hoped-for split, is of eight-frame rather than ten-frame medium boxes. It has a very rustic cedar stand waiting for it, made from the wildly differing-diameter sections of trunk of a young cedar I cleared out of a field.

Before last spring, I had never heard of a top bar hive. During the final Q&A session in my beekeeping class, a student asked about them. The teacher was fairly dismissive, clearly considering them sort of new age, woo-woo, eco-freak stuff. I subsequently found info on them on Michael Bush's very valuable site, which has become my go-to site for practical beekeeping suggestions.

Top bar hives are all at one level, with 30-40 combs in a row and not stacked up. So right off, there is the advantage of not having to lift heavy boxes – you inspect and harvest one comb at a time.

As there is just the one level, the bees don't need to be given slots for travelling up and down in the hive. So the finicky and hard-to-nail-together frames with their bee-space-providing structure are unnecessary. The top bars are sturdy, wider wooden pieces that touch each other to make a solid ceiling for the hive (covered with a waterproof roof).

And the bars are just bars, not frames. No pre-made foundation is provided: the bees are expected to make their own comb. The whole comb, wax and all, is harvested. Either the comb-honey is packaged up, or the comb is smushed up, the honey strained out, and the wax harvested for candles, etc.

This is where the top bar enthusiasts really differ from the standard-frame beekeepers. It is a point of faith with the latter that it takes the energy of seven pounds of honey to secrete a pound of wax. I say "faith" because the research that produced this figure is … flawed, and not replicated … according to the top bar folks. But the idea is that if you reuse the drawn honeycombs, giving them back to the bees to refill with more honey, you get a higher yield. This is the basis for all the effort by the traditional hive keepers to use expensive centrifugal extractors to get the honey, and to store the empty combs all winter in vast pesticide-guarded storage spaces.

Top bar beekeepers point to the benefits of letting the bees build their own comb with the varying sizes of cells they want for worker brood, drone brood, and honey. Smaller cells than the ones promoted by the use of commercial foundation seem to be valuable in discouraging the varroa mite, an Asian pest that has travelled world-wide, except to Australia (hurray for the Australian customs and quarantine!)

Moreover, foundation, which is milled from recycled wax, has measurable levels of all the pesticides and treatments that are used in the commercial beekeeping industry. These compounds are not supposed to be in the hive during the period that bees are making the excess honey for harvest.

If the bees make fresh white comb each summer, it may still contain some chemical residues, simply because the environment as a whole does. But it is a far lower level. They do, in my one summer's experience (I gave them a few frames with comb guides and no foundation last summer), make comb just about as readily as drawing out foundation, given a good honeyflow. And you get a few ounces of lovely wax along with each comb of honey.

So this winter I am building a top bar hive.+ And if all goes well with my girls over the winter, I'm planning another split. Then I will have to rein in the more, more, more impulse. I have determined that three hives will be enough!++

—————————————

* The average daily high temperature here during the month of August was 104.3°F (40°C). Almost worse, the average nighttime low was 82°F (28°C). This was the hottest month ever recorded here. As I set up a little hose-end mister by the beehive to make a microclimate space of cooler air to help them keep their wax from all melting down into a lump, I did think wistfully of AJLR's bees in their green and pleasant land.

** L. L. Langstroth was a clergyman and beekeeper in Philadelphia in the 19th century. He took the "bee space"^ concept and used it to devise a hive that is standardized and relatively easy to manage. The boxes are 9-1/2" deep (shallower varieties also exist), 16" x 20", and hold ten 19 x 9-1/8" movable frames in which are mounted pre-made sheets of foundation. I believe the British standard hive is similar, except that the frames are shorter, so that the hive is more square.

^ Bee space is the dimension – 3/8" or 1cm – that bees will leave open in the interior of the hive. A smaller space, such as a crack in the wall, they will seal with resinous propolis. A larger space they will bridge and fill up with honeycomb. Setting the frames to maintain the bee space means that you can generally remove them for inspection and harvest without doing major violence to the structure of the hive.

+ Oh, yes, the other advantage is that the structure of the top bars is so simple that it is reasonable for a moderately accomplished craftsman to build the hive herself. And much less expensive than purchase price and shipping of a Langstroth.

++ Um. This is a persistent impulse. Ask me in five years how many hives I have ;-)