first hive, upside-down top bar skep planned

[zosolm]

Having extensively researched the various kinds of hives available, I have decided to use a top bar as this seems the cheapest and easiest to maintain. I have seen a few DIY guides to making top bar hives from old containers, wardrobes, etc. but had an idea that I could use a straw skep, upturned, with bars placed over what would have been the bottom and a roof of some sort (I have a small disused ex-outhouse in the garden which I thought I could place the hive in for shelter).

Would this work? I've read that traditionally, in order to recover honey from skeps, one had to kill the bees but I imagine this design would function as a simple removable top bar hive. I've seen similar designs to this where the skep has a removable roof but can't find any of these to purchase in the UK, and thought this may be a viable solution.

Never kept bees before, read a lot about it, keen to start, grateful for advice.

Zosolm.

 

[Goran]

What seems cheapest and easiest usually isn't.
"I am not so rich to buy cheap".
First you have to learn beekeeping with mentor then buy hive, bees.. Or at least paralel.
Box is just a box, if You have no knowledge, it can be the shiniest and best on the world - useless at the end.
So my advice use one which mentor use, or if You are so brave to go alone - the one hive which is mostly used at your place. Then when you grow with experience and knowledge it will be much clearer what suits you..

 

[itma]

I'd strongly advise against starting this way.
It is making everything more difficult, when a s a beginner, doing things the easy way can still seem pretty tough.

A single colony can grow quickly to 50,000 bees in summer. And they don't do what they are told, defend their colony, come at you from all angles and sting. Plural stings gets dangerous rather than just uncomfortable.

From the mention of the garden, I wonder if there are neighbours?

Beekeeping is pretty hard to do on the cheap.
To be sustainable, you really need two colonies (in identical hives to permit interchangeability) and another (safer another two) basic hive/s available for swarm control.
Woodworking skills can reduce the cost, but even good materials aren't cheap.

The ancient greeks kept bees in baskets with (top)bars over the top.
But its not a good, an easy, or a responsible way to try to start nowadays.

My suggestion is that you should make contact with your local beekeeping association (where are you? there may be neighbours on here!) and get to learn something of the practicalities that you can't experience from books. Make contacts and offer to help to get some teaching.
After you've handled bees, you'll understand that beekeeping has advanced since the ancient greeks. Not as much as hospitals, sanitation, and communication perhaps, but enough to equally make the 'old' ways (of all those things) a curiosity rather than a practical prospect (especially for the novice).

 

[pargyle]

OK ... There's nothing wrong with starting with a top bar hive ... I built two - A Kenyan and a Tanzanian .... from designs that are freely available on another forum where top bar beekeeping and such like are more prevalent there than here. But, having built two they never got used as I recognised that, for a beginner, the importance of being able to inspect your bees, easily, and manage them is much easier with frames. So I converted my TBH into a framed hive. I'm pretty much low intereference in terms of my beekeeping, my hives are not treated for varroa and they are allowed to build their own comb without foundation and it was this premise that led me towards a TBH - but, it's not necessary - you can be an 'on the cheap', low interference beekeeper if you wish without re-inventing the wheel.

Listen to the voice of experience (in terms of your proposed course of action) - I've been there, got the T Shirt, made the movie - and moved on. Your upside down skep idea is not a good one for all the reasons ITMA says - but the biggest disadvantage is the one that you will place on yourself - the ability to learn about your bees by looking at them frequently. In addition, there's so much to learn in your first couple of years and so much that potentially can go wrong that you really need to be able to compare your bees/beekeeping with something that is at least near standard. If you are out on a limb (and your idea is well outside the conventional) you will miss out on the advice that starts 'Yes that's happened to me and I did ...xxx' ... Trust me - it's invaluable.

For me ... well, my first populated hive was a 14 x 12 framed Long Deep Hive (Google Dartington Hive) I made myself and it works very well but you need a few basic DIY skills to make one up.

But ... if you don't have the ability to make something appropriate then I'd seriously say leave it until you can afford something like my other hives - Paynes Beekeeping Polystyrene Hives - with frames they are going to cost you about £120 each and you will, sooner or later, need two of them. Plus all your kit - suit, tools, smoker, etc. etc. - it all mounts up.

A year getting alongside a local beekeeper and joining a local association, reading everything you can and getting some hands on experience will tell you whether it's what you really want from a hobby (which can rapidly become an obsession !). A lot of people give up after the first year in frustration as there's a bit more to it than just chucking a few bees in a box and getting honey ...

There are lots of friendly people on here that will be happy to help but ... re-think your plan, it's not a good one !

 

[drex]

I agree with all. Join local association. Learn with "conventional" hives, then if you like move on to TBH. That is what I did and am glad I did. Mind you, I now learn a lot about bee behaviour from my TBHs.

 

[user 6228]

As some one who build hives with a degree on innovation, all be it framed: Get the most conventional first, then make your design. That way you can have a point of comparison so you tell if have made improvements or otherwise

 

[domino]

TBH are on my to do list, they look great fun and I'm sure as a beginner if you had the correct support you'd be able to manage it no problem.

However, as the others have pointed out it is most likely that you'll be surrounded by people working in framed hives. I personally found the steepest learning curve in the first three years and would have probably struggled without that knowledge base in my local association members and their ability to show me how to do things on the kit I was running.

If you want to do TBH I would make sure that there are people local who also are running that kit and can support you.

 

[Bosleeu]

I would learn with a conventional hive first as suggested. An upturned skep with top-bars have great potential to turn into a dome-shaped mass of comb and bees attached to the sides and very difficult to do anything with.

It's good to try new things, but personally I don't think it will work.

 

[REDWOOD]

It All depends why you want to keep bees, if it's for pollination and just a general interest then any container big enough to house a colony that is warm and dry will do but if you want to produce honey then go for a more traditional hive that has removable frames

 

[Tom Bick]

Dont know if he still makes them but worth looking at Tom Beck's hive.

http://inhabitat.com/tom-backs-straw-thrive-hive-is-a-cozy-home-for-bees/thrive-hive-tom-back-4-2/

 

[Chris B]

Yes, nothing wrong with top bar hives, but start with something proven, like a Warre. It would be a mistake to try to design a hive before you have any experience of bees.

 

[madasafish]

I started with TBHs.. I found them easy to build and look after...

 

[BeeJayBee]

Having extensively researched the various kinds of hives available, I have decided to use a top bar as this seems the cheapest and easiest to maintain. I have seen a few DIY guides to making top bar hives from old containers, wardrobes, etc. but had an idea that I could use a straw skep, upturned, with bars placed over what would have been the bottom and a roof of some sort (I have a small disused ex-outhouse in the garden which I thought I could place the hive in for shelter).

Would this work?

Would it work? A lot would depend on the bees you put into the hive and your ability as a beekeeper and, as you're new to beekeeping, the answer might well be that it wouldn't work out too well and you'll end up with an empty skep, with your bees hanging from the nearest tall tree.

We spent a long time, years, planning starting beekeeping. We were seriously swayed by top bar hives and the organic/traditional pre-framed hives idea of using straw skeps and spent a lot of time researching them as well as talking to local beekeepers. We did a lot of talking and listening.

Some years down the line we ended up with polystyrene Jumbo Langstroths! It's about as far away from our first ideas as possible, but we think we made the right decision in the end - for us and four our local bees. These hives may not suit you, and may not suit the bees you end up with.

So talk a lot, ask a lot of questions, and think a lot and learn at least the basics of beekeeping. Do this before you make a decision to spend any money because beekeeping can be like a money pit, at least during the first few years. If you buy a large skep and decide you and your bees don't like it, it'll be money badly spent.

 

[pargyle]

Well ... just hope he comes back to benefit from all the good advice he's been given !!

 

[Fritillary]

I have started out with horizontal top bar hives - from others' plans (tweaked a bit here and there). I would only add to what others have said: if you do decide to go down that route, why waste your time and effort on poor materials? I'm a rubbish novice carpenter, but still thought it worth using good thick cedar to start out with and am glad I did. - Have seen a couple of TBHs that others have made/bought and thought the wood too thin.

 

[ugcheleuce]

I have decided to use a top bar as this seems the cheapest and easiest to maintain. I had an idea that I could use a straw skep, upturned, with bars placed over what would have been the bottom...

Your innovation is called a "Greek top-bar hive" or a tub-shaped top-bar hive, and is among the first known top-bar hives in history. Woven hives are less heavy than ceramic, but there are also ceramic variants from history:

https://www.academia.edu/1929792/A_17th_Century_Testimony_On_The_Use_Of_Ceramic_Top-bar_Hives._2012

These hives had a diameter of about 30-35 cm at the top and were about 30 cm tall. That gave a total volume of 20 litres, which is about a third of the 60 litres that modern bee hives typically have as a minimum.

But if you live in a climate with practically no winter, and if you are a full-time beekeeper, and if you have many hives and spare hives, then I suppose a hive of 20 litres could be workable.

I've read that traditionally, in order to recover honey from skeps, one had to kill the bees...

No, even in skeps you didn't have to kill the bees. You just had to get them out of the skep and into another one. And you'd have to break out whole combs, because the honey would be stored at the top, and you can't remove the honey comb without removing the entire brood portion of the comb. But that applies to top-bar beekeeping as well -- the honey is at the top (and, if you're lucky, towards the rear of the hive).

I've seen similar designs to this where the skep has a removable roof but can't find any of these to purchase in the UK...

Alfred Neighbour popularlised those types of hives in the UK... in the 1800s. The removable roof wasn't for being able to remove the comb temporarily, but for being able to add a "super" to the skep.

Never kept bees before, read a lot about it, keen to start, grateful for advice.

I echo what others here have said: start with traditional hives, unless you are able to join a club of enthusiasts that use non-traditional hives.

 

[pargyle]

Well ... just hope he comes back to benefit from all the good advice he's been given !!

Is it any wonder that some of our more experienced members get a little tetchy and decline to offer advice ?

OP joins forum at 9.25pm on 16th, asking for advice ... last seen 10.17pm ... on the 16th ... wasting our breath ...

 

[ugcheleuce]

OP joins forum at 9.25pm on 16th, asking for advice ... last seen 10.17pm ... on the 16th ... wasting our breath ...

You don't have to visit the forum's web site to see the replies to your post.

 

[rolande]

Is it any wonder that some of our more experienced members get a little tetchy and decline to offer advice ?

I don't think that it matters whether the op returns or not, if the 'experienced members' wish to write something useful it'll be here for someone else to learn from at a later date.

 

[pargyle]

I don't think that it matters whether the op returns or not, if the 'experienced members' wish to write something useful it'll be here for someone else to learn from at a later date.

Yes ... that's true ... but it does seem that we see a lot of first time posts asking for advice and then they drop off very quickly .. and not because of anyone replying with anything other than constructive advice. There have been lots and lots over the years and I did wonder ... so much enthusiasm in the first posts then just disappear ? Is it reality kicking in and they decide it's not for them or do they go on to become beekeepers ?