Top Bar Beekeeping Forum

[Gary]

Norm,

Once again your woodworking skills amaze me that looks great!
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Gary
www.hirschbachapiary.com
gary@hirschbachapiary.com

Procrastination is the assassination of inspiration!

There are good men willing to do evil things to protect you from evil men doing evil things in the name of good.

[Norm]

Gary, thanks but it really isn't. It's what I would kindly call "Rough & Ready". Adequate for the job mind and cheap as you like. When you look at that last photo, it really is just a couple of old pallets, some glue and a few screws. I don't have to impress anyone and the bees don't mind.
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Feral bees are natures survivors and have, by the survival of the fittest principle, overcome disease and mite problems without mans intervention.

[gerryt]

Norm - fantastic idea. I also have lots of National top bars lying around from unmade frames. One question though - would it be sufficient do you think to just have a certain proportion of the National top bars with spacers underneath the top box? Ie - intersperse the National bars with normal parallel top bars? I guess the National bars are there only temporarily anyway so if there was enough space for the bees to move up and down wouldn't that be all that's needed?

Not speaking from a position of knowledge here you understand but just something that occurred to me. BTW - you are quite a whizz with the old pallets! I've even been moved to acquire a few myself through Freecycle and have Norm-like intentions for them!

Cheers

Gerry

[Norm]

Hi Gerry,

Yes it is a fantastic idea isn't it.

I think Phil and Varrex virtually both came up with it at about the same time. I just adapted it to my circumstances. The layens hive is a fixed floor and hinged roof which are not demountable. Great for moving but impossible for anything like this, hence my transfer box.

These National top bars are the wider ones you use for honeycomb although as long as the spacer you add brings them to the correct widths then no prob's. I used the bottom sticks of the frame cut down for the spacers. Worked out at about 34mm spacing.

I thought about only using a few interspersed with ordinary top bars but the top bar end thicknesses are different by at least qtr inch which would mean the top box was sat on something like this
---__---__---__---
leaving gaps!

I am glad that I have inspired you to have a go at using pallet or any other scrap wood. Conventional beekeeping is so expensive and this just shows it doesn't have to cost anything.
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Feral bees are natures survivors and have, by the survival of the fittest principle, overcome disease and mite problems without mans intervention.

[Droner]

Transfer Update.
It seems that a two super stack upon our said design gives too much room for a queen to work. The workers refuesed to make any comb below in the month I have had this set up.

We had a swarm.
I still had plenty of bees left over and about 5 queen cells in the hive this afternoon. Nearly every frame was completely covered with bees, spilling out into the top cover and a bit of bearding at the entrance.

Today I split the hive and left one super on the TBH. Hoping this will move them to the TBH.

Ill keep ya posted...
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"This huge thing... just grabbed my couch! Flicked me off of it...THen it reached over and took all the beer in the fridge!"

[Droner]

Well today i gave up and shook the lang hive into the TBH.
I dont know if perhaps I am too impatient or the bees just didn't see the need to move into the new space.

Lets go over what i did. At least some things that if I had to do it again, I would do differently.

1. I cut only cut enough spaced bars to open up about 3/4 of the bottom of the lang super.

Perhaps the bees saw that they could have gotten trapped in winter if they were to build below.

At best a more open area would have increased the percentage chance that they would have started to build comb below and the queen a chance to wander into the area.

2. I stacked two lang supers up top when I probably should have only used one.

I think the colony was quite happy with the space in the langs. I think i should have condensed the comb, picking as much full with brood as possible for the super to be stacked, and got rid of the second super.

The colony rather than moving below threw a swarm, and an after swarm even after splitting.

3. Having a few bars of brood comb to place in the TBH may have done the trick early on. But after two weeks with a bar of comb in the TBH as bait, the bees still show no interest.

4. And at the point of shaking, the lang super was nearly honey bound. Only a small pattern of brood in one or two frames.

this tells me that perhaps I should have waited a bit longer. But we will be in lean times soon as far as forage... so i decided to go ahead with the shakedown, and feed the honey back to the bees.

I hope they will have time to build and store reserves for the winter.
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"This huge thing... just grabbed my couch! Flicked me off of it...THen it reached over and took all the beer in the fridge!"

[biobee]

I think you did the right thing. Getting bees to move from one type of box to another is a problem we still need to solve - I'm trying to get my 'bottomless bees' to move up into a Warré box using gapped bars, with similar lack of success so far.

I think that once they have set up home and have started building comb in a pattern that satisfies them, it takes a lot to shift them into doing something different. A bit like people, I guess...
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The Barefoot Beekeeper www.biobees.com

[BJ_in_Hants]

[biobee]

[Gary]

The problem here is bees don't like to do anything the easy way!
_________________
Gary
www.hirschbachapiary.com
gary@hirschbachapiary.com

Procrastination is the assassination of inspiration!

There are good men willing to do evil things to protect you from evil men doing evil things in the name of good.

[John]

Hi Phil

[biobee]