Top Bar Hive Walkthrough- Pros and Cons

hey everybody today i want to talk about top bar hives specifically the pros and cons to why i like them why i still keep them even though i keep langstroth hives too in future i want to do something very similar for the langstroth hives and just to kind of go over kind of help newer beekeepers or you know beekeepers that have been around for a while or maybe people getting into beekeeping why i choose these specific hive types so with that said i also want to mention if you want a good balance between a top bar hive and a langstroth hive there's a hive called the uh i've heard called langstroth long and also horizontal hive so basically it uses the frames from a langstroth hive while being in the style of a top bar hive where it's long benefit to that is you don't have to do a lot of lifting you know the lengths drop hives they stack and sometimes the honey on top one of those boxes will be could be 70 pounds so it's hard to unstack those with the long hives you're only dealing with one frame at a time so it's beneficial there is somebody who's been encouraging me another youtuber uh basically in my my whole youtube journey i've been doing over the past few months um and he builds these things he does a great job doing it his name's ricky rourke i'm going to add a link to one of his videos down below and i hope you guys enjoy it if you uh like his stuff subscribe subscribing and liking videos is a lot of encouragement for us youtubers so i i always appreciate you guys doing it for me and especially these other guys who really encouraged me along the way and i thank you all for encouraging me also so i'll start talking about these top bars all right so i've shown in videos in the past how i build these top bars they are pretty simple to build the only one measurement you really need to worry about is the bar size because that's what determines how far apart they build the combs but you'll see that a little bit so the the measurements and everything and there's a bunch of schematics you can pull up online and to help you see how to build these you can really decorate them you can leave them plain as i do it and i do them very plain and very simple and very uh cost effective is a lot of my goal so you can see that they're long benefits to this is that you don't have to do a lot of lifting like i mentioned the langstroth hive stack up as you get more and more honey these hives aren't meant to do that they're meant to be completely contained in this one box here with that being said you don't like it you don't have to do a lot of lifting it's easier for people with bad backs or that struggle lifting 70 pounds right here and putting it on the ground so these are very popular for backyard beekeepers some people say it's not good to start with a top bar but that's how i started and i enjoyed it since the beginning i just i love how these uh these hives are built put together downfall to this is it is stationary it's not very easy to move it depends on how long and how big you build it of course these are about 33 inches long they are very heavy especially filled with these they're not easy to move versus the langstroth where you can kind of take it apart in pieces and move it so that's something to keep uh in consideration wherever you find these hives or wherever you want these hives put them let the bees go in them and that's probably where they're gonna stay you can't really do a lot of some people do pollination services it's not advised with these top bars because which you'll see in a little bit there's no support for the combs so as they get rattled around if it's a honeycomb honey's really heavy and there's no support except for on the top bar so if they get rattled around they could break and that combs gonna fall and make a mess and the bees aren't gonna be happy you're gonna have to fix it you're not gonna be happy it's just a mess so again uh put these somewhere and leave them and just enjoy them where they're at all right so i'm gonna try to get you a view kind of how i see it so here's the lid the lid basically keeps it waterproof because once you get down to these top bars you're gonna find i've actually found a couple scorpions in here just because i'm in a piney environment so i've and that's only been at the new place never had that before so i keep an eye on it uh i mentioned comb breaking so if any of those comb break i usually keep a few of these rescue bars around so you'll see the comb attaches to the top if any of that ever breaks off i can pick that comb up that's broken off and push it back on here and put it in and the bees will repair it that's what i did i used some of those for that cut out that i did in the mailbox alright so i usually start at the back and this one swarmed a couple weeks ago and it looks like the population's already a good size so you see this one that's that bar that i mentioned so i use these starter strips it's just a little piece of wood and the bees will build wax straight from there and whenever you get honey whenever there's honey on it you just take a knife take a bucket brush off all the bees and cut it down and just drop in a bucket and you do a crush and strain method that is uh it's a little bit more um i guess another downfall to a top bar is you usually won't have the ability to extract the honey uh through like putting the comb in and spinning it out like you would a traditional length draw frame usually there's a crush and strain method unless you want to develop some kind of specialized tool that you can use another issue i want to show and there's some going on in this one and i've learned not to be worried about this with a top bar hive is called cross combing so basically what happens is the bees will start building fat comb towards the back where there's honey because honey is always a little bit fatter so if you can see this pokes out some and they've actually started to attach it to the next bar this problem can get really out of hand and a lot of people you know when you mention a top bar they talk about cross combing to me it's really not that much of an issue so i'll pull this one out now like i said you can see that it's just a little bit cross combed right now and sometimes there'll be four or five of these bars stuck together and it'll progressively get worse and you can see that is honey coming out from there honey on that side and over here they already got some cap stuff which is good they got some a lot of these are drones actually back here like that guy that guy that guy and they are freeloading all those are drums so i'm surprised that there's actually this much uh honey storage going on because one like i said this hive is swarmed already and two because in this area where i'm at there's a lot of goldberry honey that's like what this area is known for it's the goldberry and they haven't started blooming yet usually they should be coming up pretty quick usually it's a man june thing and these hives will be packed with honey and that's what i'm excited about now if you see this is more capped honey and this right now is edible right uh and storable i guess that's the main thing um and that is a lot so they are doing a really good job now let's get back to the cross combing thing now as if they continue to cross comb and it gets worse and worse and worse it's a simple fix for me all i do is make sure it's not attached to the side so if it is i take my knife and i just cut all the way down slice all the way down the sides and then if there's three or four stuck together i'll move them back as a whole unit and up here i'll just put in empty bars and i'll do that in between straight combs so they'll keep building straight straight and i continue to move that back every time i work it i'll put some you know just one of these empty bars in between two full combs and the that eventually straightens it out now this cross comb stuff we're still left with that but perfect it's filled up with honey so honey collection time i put it over a bucket try to get as many of the bees off as i can chop it into the bucket and then i don't care if it's cross combs or not and then i have these empty bars that i'm left with and i can put these back up front so it's a continuous cycle another advantage of these top bars is that we can continually cycle through fresh clean comb and we're not getting comb that's been stored up over time that eventually gets chemicals and everything leaked into it all right you can see this one's a straight one this is what we want so what you could do is between these two straight ones you know there's no cross combing you just put an empty one and then they build the comb there they can't cross comb it because they're wedged in between the two combs already now this hive is very full i don't really want to split this high because they're in production mode and i want them to make i want them to fill this hive up with honey that is my goal all right so up here you can see you got the capped honey at the top and then you got all the nectar down below that that dark nectar that they're they're covering up so what makes i guess this is bonus information what makes honey a specific kind of honey like i mentioned goldberry earlier is that's the nectar they produce so when bees bring in nectar generally has like 70 or 80 percent water content and what they do over time is they fan it and they dehydrate it and they get that nectar down to about a 17 to 19 percent water content and that's when they can cap it that's honey so basically it's just nectar that's been ultra dehydrated okay all right so with the top bars also when we're holding them we can be up and down like this up and down like this even to the side to that side however like that what we can never do is take this and do this because once we do that once we put this comb this way there's no support because there's no foundation so it's going to break and that's when we're going to be using these rescue bars so we're just going to be able to push that right back on now if it has nectar or honey in it push this guy out wrong way you go so if there's nectar or honey on that uh on that comb it's you're not going to be able to get it to stick that because nectar and honey is so heavy it's just going to break that wax and fall through those wires all right so we're going up and you see we've gotten into brood so another thing about these top bar hives and again this swarmed a while back so you can see that there is a lot of brood and again the older stuff is in the middle and as you can see as it goes outer you have younger and younger stuff this is a really good comb i mean i can see i don't know if you can see there's brood and almost you know varying ages of brood in almost all of those cells same thing on this side that is a good queen and she is brand new she'll be good for a couple years so next year i'm definitely going to try to get ahead of things and not let this hive swarm because i know that queen is going to be good so but with that brood so the queen has a brood area just like in a langstroth hive so inside that brood area that's where the eggs are laid that's where the nurse bees raise the larva and everything and that is um essentially like i said where the where the where the young bees are raised this is heavy okay so she normally will not want to go past honey now i say that like this one had a lot of brood in it and so i'm looking at these right and all of a sudden this one has honey in it so honey honey on each side and you're like man that's that's that's crazy you know what happened she's supposedly once there's honey made she does not want to cross that honey and laney eggs but there's clear evidence that she did so i think what we're gonna see is this which is good look at that pattern that is pattern of a great queen and like i said she is new she is new and that is just a great pattern and i'm pretty sure those ones that have holes in it are probably emerge and i'm looking for for emerging brood now to see if that's the case you see these bees kind of going back in and cleaning cells out that's a good that's a really good pattern now what i'm gonna have to do is i'm seeing this um being a little bit of an issue so in the meantime while the queen and here we have honey too so while the queen was getting ready to start laying i think the other bees have started to fill this up with honey so what i'm going to end up doing is checkerboarding several of these because i want her to stay up here i want to have couple bars of honey back here stopping her from wanting to lay eggs back because back here i just want honey that way any of those bars are just full honey and there's no brood in them so i can chop them and chop drop and crush and strain here's another pattern you can see it is just jam full i want to emphasize that she is a new queen [Music] this is a vigorous laying queen it's good all of that is brewed see the difference in honey where it's that translucent color and brood where it's that really dark brown color and this is all worker brood drone brood has a raised up cap it almost looks like a tiny little um just a little bit of a rounded part versus it being flat so another benefit to top bar hives is you can see the bees build all natural comb and so the argument has been the bees can build whatever size they say they want to in nature if you use a foundation the foundation has pre-prep cell shapes on it so it's telling those bees to build that cell however it is it's shaped so with this top bars just give them the freedom to build however they want to and so the argument is is that bees typically like smaller cells because when they came out foundation the foundation was kind of to encourage larger cells so when they started storing honey when they started storing honey the uh they would have bigger cells to store the honey in now the problem with bigger cells is that you have uh mites the varroa mites that their life cycle is to lay the eggs inside of big cells that's why they love drones see that drone how much bigger he is than the worker the drone cells are much bigger so they're more likely to have varroa mites in those cells now with these smaller cells where the bees build them themselves the varroa mite can't um well the argument is basically gets crowded out so it's more uncomfortable for the varroa mite there won't be as many mites and this is just the natural way to fight against mites just have these smaller cell sizes and i want to point out here you see one of my old old style v's similar to this one fell and it fell in the hive so what i did is i used a rescue bar like this and i just pushed it right back on and you can see there's the metal wires and they just reattached it all so it's it's attached pretty well all right and like i said this queen is just a laying machine so once all of these come out there is going to be a huge population of bees and i'm probably going to end up splitting them probably closer to the end of i'll probably do a honey pool um let's see it's it's very end of april now i'll probably do a honey pool um end of may and then i'll go ahead and split so that way they have enough time to make a new queen before the dearth hits and they throw all the drones out but i would definitely leave that queen here and so sometimes you want to make sure that you find the queen but sometimes when you see evidence of a laying queen like this it is not that big of a deal not to find her because you know she is doing her job and there's no queen cells where you know they may have swarmed so um like i'm not concerned with not finding the queen oh actually there she is so she's right there she's actually looking on this where they've already so the beginning the front of the the hives is where they usually they come in and they do all the temporary like nectar and pollen stores it's like i said it's right in the front and she's actually on this uh comb uh looking for a place to lay because she is out of places so what i'm gonna do i'm gonna put this one back because i found her again make sure she's down here so i'm not squishing her between the bars i'm going to give them an empty bar here and i'm going to go a few and i'm gonna give them this halfway put together bar right they'll straighten it out if i can make some room this gets very heavy let me start trying to do it like this and again i like to as i put them back i like to go ahead and put them side by side instead of having them all spread apart a little bit because what the bees do is they start getting in between and on the boards and i just don't want at the end it to be like a big struggle trying to get all these bars put back without squishing the bees so i put them together several at a time kind of shimmy them in to give the bees a time to move out of the way so i'll check her board this one they're almost to the back so i am going to check aboard them again now this hive even though it was just split this has a tendency already to spawn because it is so packed with and the queen's running out of room because she's such a crazy layer so having a good laying queen isn't necessarily an issue until she runs out of room and i don't mind that i just don't want to lose the productivity by having them swarm and plus like i mentioned in other videos i don't want them swarming and moving into somebody's house cutouts are nice but uh they're not so nice when you're having to pay for it all right so i got another empty one these get a little tight so i'm put it right back down there and now they have a few that are empty now when the bees since this and the brew chamber they like to be close together so they like all those combs stacked after another so they'll actually probably come here the wax builders and start building this out before they continue to build wax here because they want that brood chamber to be continuous so right here we're forcing that behavior trying to get them to build build bill so that's the idea of checkerboarding that's the technical name for this all right so that's what i have for today uh trying to make these videos a little bit shorter i try not to get as wordy but i know that was still extremely wordy so i'm just gonna end it but before i do like i said some upcoming things um still waiting 250 subscribers and i'll give that nuke away i have a few really good ones going and i just made another split uh so i will give the that away um also remember to check out my friend ricky rourke's channel it's really good and uh just if you guys have any questions about top bars or any other beekeeping questions let me know if you have anything that you know any advice for me with top bars let me know because i always wanted to learn i always wanted to do a little bit better and build this beekeeping community up so hope you all have a great day love you all if you haven't subscribed please click that again thank you all so much for watching

Channel: Ralph White

Views: 30,088

Keywords: honey bee, honey bees, bee, bees, honey, hives, top bar, topbar, cross combing, cross, combing, comb, wax, apiary, flroida, clay, langstroth, horizontal hive, beekeeping, bee keeping, association, queen, farm, farming, homestead, ranch, nature, permaculture, treatment free

Id: WXYMcpSkEMQ

Length: 22min 58sec (1378 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 30 2021