Don't Buy or Build a Top Bar Hive - until you have watched this!

hi this is Phil Chandler on a sunny day towards the end of September 2016 but I just like to talk to you for a short time about some important aspects of topbar hive design just in case you want to build your own or modify an existing hi right now in this area it's Ivy season and as you can see the bees are busy bringing in all the nectar and pollen they can find for their winter stores you can see on this hi there's three entrances towards one end at the front and there's a similar arrangement at the back so the entrances of the back of the other end so the when the hive is rotated the entrances appear to be in exactly the same place as far as the visa concern as is important when you do swarm control so it's a useful way of way of doing artificial swarming to rotate the hive which I'll talk to you about in some other video the important aspect of this is that though there is a space between the entrances and the end of the hive so now we're looking at the inside of the same hive and you can see here's the gap I was talking about there's the end wall of the hive this is the first follower board and the reason for this gap here is twofold number one I can put a feeder in here if I would choose to and the access to the feeder would be through the hole which is drilled in the follower board right there so that's one reason the other reason is that I want to be able to see very quickly and easily at any time what's going on in this hive towards the entrance now if I put the camera down there you can see the bees coming in and out of the entrance I think and there's their comb right there so I can see quite clearly what they're doing the building comb and they're going about their business filling up that cone with pollen and nectar so that gives me a very quick view inside that end of the hive and at the other end of the high here's the other follower board which I can likewise move away very quickly and easily I can look inside and I can see the bees going about their business at this end so the reason for two follower boards very clear and simple is that I can see both ends of the colony very quickly and easily without disturbing the bees on the top here I've got a standard feeder one of the types of feeder that has a tank one side and be access the other side there's no food in there at the moment as you can see there's a slot I made a slot in one of the top so the bee said here the bees right here the bees can come up into the feeder and take food down it's not in use at the moment because there's plenty of food around outside and you'd feed them you notice that I have a hinged roof on this hive that's for very simple reason that it's a lot easier to flip up a roof like this than it is to lift one off and that just makes life easier for the beekeeper it also provides a bit of a barrier so when you're working here behind the hive the bees flying in at the front are confronted with a vertical wall as you can see if I come back around here and that kind of stops them flying directly into your face the bees are very occupied at the moment so they're not interesting what I'm doing particularly but it does provide that kind of buffer against the against the flying bees coming back now I've removed already the installation from this hive normally this I would have insulation on top of the top bars it hasn't right now but he should have hand I'll be putting that back very shortly the purpose of the insulation is to retain heat in hive obviously but also to keep heat out of the hive if you live in a hot climate you don't want heat penetrating the roof on the top bars and warming up the interior beyond the point where the bees can really cope with it so it's it's both keeping heat in and heat out depending on the season your location and the time of year but the the main purpose of it really is to stabilize the interior environment of the hive it's very important to bees to have a stable environment inside their hive in terms of humidity and in terms of temperature and they can only do that if they conceal themselves in and really take control of that space and so you will find that between top bars there will be a thin line of propolis where they've sealed up I'm not going to open it now because these bees are busy I don't if you want to disturb them but you will find that there's a fine line of propolis between each pair of top bars and they attempt they do their very best to seal themselves in in order to take control of that internal environment so help them along by providing the best possible conditions for okay let's look at the legs the legs are held on by bolts make sure you use bolts not wood screws wood screws are not up to the job bolts straight through the sides that'll hold the thing together and make sure nothing unpleasant happens make sure the angle of your legs is such that the hive is inherently stable they should extend beyond the width of the hive as you can see here legs extend considerably wider than the hive body itself this ensures that nothing is going to tip this hive over it takes a considerable effort to destabilize this hive and it really shouldn't happen at all even even with fairly large animal rubbing against it which obviously you want to try and prevent anyway but you know even if it does then they can have a real difficulty turning that hive over which makes this probably the most stable bee hive apart from the ones are actually kind of cemented into the ground which I have seen there are blocks on this particular high there are blocks sticking out here so that when you open the lid the lid rests in H a slightly over vertical position that's quite important you want to make sure your lid is stable in that position because he's only falling on your fingers and you set definitely don't want it falling off the other side down here this is the probably the best design of top bar that we've come up with as you can see it's got a v-shape fairly shallow V doesn't have to be a very deep V although it can be I don't have a problem with that but this works very well provides a nice surface for the bees to attach their comb to there's a cutout at each end if anything that cutout could be doing a little bit deeper leaving a shallower tab because the the tab here could be used in a national hive so you could put one of these bars in between cones on a national hive and the thickness of that tab there means that it would sit down in between the frames in the recess I think it's a little bit on the thick side actually on this particular bar but you get the idea anyway so the other thing that does is when it's in the hive in its correct position which is why that the cutaway here this this step here means that the bar can't slide off the hive when it's not actually in use which is kind of useful to these bees are really working hard on the ivy which is good to see means they can have plentiful stores in their cones and probably won't be them feeding I do get asked quite a lot about why the sides of the top bar hive are sloped now there are actually several reasons for that first of all as they slip towards the ground they get much less direct exposure to the Sun which means that the sides stay reasonably cool which enhances the process of evaporation and condensation because evaporation happens obviously with the help of heat from the brood area condensation requires the surface to be cooler than the body in temperature inside the hive so keeping the sides cool is important now this time of year the sun's quite low in the sky and that means that the sides this particular side is getting a fair bit of Sun but it's not a strong Sun it's not strong heat and so it's not really going to make a lot of difference but in the summer when the sun's high in the sky the sides hardly get any Sun at all which is important at that time of year because that's when those the nectar is going to come in another reason for sloped sides is to do with cone stability now I'm not going to take a comb out of here right now but I will take that's a an unused follower board here which I'll take out just to demonstrate the principle this is obviously a follower board and so this would be the shape of the cone that the bees make in this hive now the important aspect here is that when you are handling cone it is very important that you don't obviously break it off and this shape the trapezoid shape with a large attached area at the top and a much smaller amount of mass at the bottom is inherently more stable than if it was a complete rectangle well when you're when you're turning a comb over to look at the other side which I can only do awkwardly with one hand but it you rotate it in this plane so if I'm doing it like that I'm rotating it keeping always in the vertical plane and that means that you won't get hopefully not get any brake offs you can build hives with with straight size you can build what they call the Tanzanian style of top bar hive with straight sides but vertical sides but personally I found that the comb nearest the sides in those hives tends to get mold on it over the winter whereas in this shape that doesn't seem to pretty much never happens so that's maybe another aspect worth looking at perhaps I should also mention too that the reason that my top bars are 17 inches long is that that is the length of the top bar of the British national hive and that was a very deliberate move on my part because I wanted to have some compatibility between the two systems obviously you can't put a frame directly into a top behind because of its shape but you can use these top bars in a national hive should you choose to do so it's actually a good way of getting straight comb to start your hive is to put some of these top bars in between already drawn frames in a national hive and you obviously to do that you need bars that's 17 inches long now if you're American I'll use a long straw hive then you'll want to make your top bars 19 inches long most likely because that's the size of the when straw hive top bar so that's it for now that's some important aspects of top behive design I hope that's helpful and any questions please go ahead and ask and don't forget to subscribe to this channel you

Channel: Phil Chandler: Barefoot Beekeeper

Views: 218,692

Keywords: beekeeping, bee keeping, natural beekeeping, biobees, phil chandler, top bar hive, top bar hive review

Id: yw1hPeYw-VY

Length: 12min 32sec (752 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 01 2016