Starting a top bar hive

[Boston Bees]

The crops of honey from Top Bar Hives are rarely as good as those you get from framed hives ..

I've never understood the reason for this .. you get a few combs in a good year but they don't seem to produce the crops that you get from a framed vertical hive.

My long deep hive on 14 x 12 frames produces huge colonies of bees and will provide a surplus crop of honey but .. despite there being perhaps 10 or 12 seams of bees in there they will only produce about 20 to 30 lbs of surplus - compared to significantly more than that from my vertical hives. The LDH is a triple wall heavily insulated hive and the bees love it - low varroa levels, rarely swarm, happy bees that are nice to handle ... but they just seem to stop producing honey at the point where they have enough ...

They back fill the frames as Autumn comes along and they always have enough to see them through without feeding but less than a super of honey by comparison ... perhaps it's the horizontal nature of these hives ? Harder for them to store and ripen honey when it is alongside the brood rather than above it ?

Perhaps someone has a better explanation ?

They are great as donor hives though - they make masses of bees.

Warre had a go at Layens hives because (in his opinion), as soon as the bees had a solid frame of honey at the side of the broodnest, it would form a honey barrier and they would consider their nest complete (horizontally at least) and store no further honey on the adjacent frames. Of course, that can happen in a vertical sense too.... But bees appear to be programmed to hate having open space above their heads, while not caring about open space to the side as much (perhaps because of the heat management implications) ?

So, what you say doesn't surprise me, though I have no personal experience with long horizontal hives so can't really add much value.

 

[Newbeeneil]

The crops of honey from Top Bar Hives are rarely as good as those you get from framed hives ..

I've never understood the reason for this .. you get a few combs in a good year but they don't seem to produce the crops that you get from a framed vertical hive.

My long deep hive on 14 x 12 frames produces huge colonies of bees and will provide a surplus crop of honey but .. despite there being perhaps 10 or 12 seams of bees in there they will only produce about 20 to 30 lbs of surplus - compared to significantly more than that from my vertical hives. The LDH is a triple wall heavily insulated hive and the bees love it - low varroa levels, rarely swarm, happy bees that are nice to handle ... but they just seem to stop producing honey at the point where they have enough ...

They back fill the frames as Autumn comes along and they always have enough to see them through without feeding but less than a super of honey by comparison ... perhaps it's the horizontal nature of these hives ? Harder for them to store and ripen honey when it is alongside the brood rather than above it ?

Perhaps someone has a better explanation ?

They are great as donor hives though - they make masses of bees.

I think you could be right in your horizontal/vertical hypothesis. My long hive is on standard National frames, also well insulated but has the option of having supers on top. It was its first year last year, occupied 19 of the 23 frames and I extracted about 50lbs from the supers.
They obviously preferred to going vertical to store the honey rather than filling the extra brood frames.

 

[Fish]

thank you all so much I am overwhelmed with your kindness. I'm a happy DIY messer so I'd give it a go with crop and chop. My own national hive is big and it's getting messy inside. I feel I could do with sorting it out. Put some new frames in and maybe some of the exterior structure could be changed too.

is it hard to spilt a hive. could someone point me to a link maybe. at the same time if there's any bees anyone's selling that would be suitable I'd be happy to buy. My top bar was made from a design on line and it is big. with about 15 bars. honestly thanks fo royal help Nick