Bees in the TBH, take 2

Today I took a thorough inventory of what the bees had built in the hive and decided to take the plunge: I split the hive. There were two brood frames with a queen cell each on them. So I took those frames, another with lots of brood and two frames with honey, nectar and pollen and put them into my TBH. I added two brood bars and a follower board and put both hives back together, putting fresh frames in the empty slots in the old hive. By this time the bees sounded irritated and I was hot & tired so I went away for a break.

My plan was to set up a false swarm: to leave the queen in the Langstroth hive and force the bees on the hives to raise a new queen for themselves. (It is a great plan - as long as the existing queen is where she's supposed to be). And I had almost talked myself into believing that the she was most likely on one of the frames I'd left in the Lang.

But as I was about to drive away I decided, in the spirit of Murphy's law, that the odds of something going horribly wrong with anything are directly proportional to the distance you have to drive to fix it. My hives are an hour's drive from my home. That, and the bees in the Lang had not calmed down during my break. If anything they sounded even angrier. So I got back out of the car and went through the TBH frame-by-frame.

And there she was! I found the queen on the second frame I pulled. So I yanked the outer cover off the Lang hive and gingerly set the bottom edge of the frame down on the inner cover. The queen was a regular Cheshire cat; appearing and disappearing among the masses of nurse bees. After a few very long minutes I managed to get her to walk up my hive tool far enough for me to flick it slightly and drop her near the hole in the inner cover.

I got one last glimpse of her as she bolted into the hive. Right away the noise of the hive fell to a murmur and the peevish cloud of bees outside the hive entrance vanished. Foragers came and went and the hive hummed along quietly as if nothing had happened.

Puderzucker - (K)ein Zuckerschlecken für Bienen?

Usually when I watch youtube movies by beekeepers I think, "yeah, I could do that". Here's the first exception. I'm not scared of my bees, though I do take what I consider reasonable precautions. And while I admire the fact that he can do it this way, one of my precautions will be to not imitate this beekeeper.



Powdered sugar is an increasingly popular means for dealing with varroa mite infestations. There are several common ways of applying it. But this guy does it with a boldness that has to been seen to be believed.

When I treat my bees I plan to use a method I saw demonstrated at a TBA meeting recently. The idea is that you take a framed window screen the size of the inner cover, lay the screen atop an open brood box, pour on a cup or two of powdered sugar and spread the sugar around the screen with a brush so it falls evenly into the hive. (bee brush, clean chip brush, etc) Lift the screen and sweep any sugar off the tops of the frames into the space between.

In other words, open the hive, place the screen, pour the sugar, spread the sugar, pull the screen, sweep the frame tops, replace the hive tops, walk away. Supposedly its that simple.

NYT on Beekeeping in NYC

The New York Times has an interesting article, "For Hives and Honey; Rooftop Beekeepers Defy Law to Get That Sweet Central Park Bouquet."

For Hives and Honey...

It is a story about a New York beekeeper who works with NYC residents to set up and maintain hives in out-of-the-way places like rooftops. The resident gets some training in beekeeping and a cut of the honey. The beekeeper gets to have more hives that are dispersed across a larger area. The bees get to forage with less direct competition between hives. So it is a win-win-win.

On the other hand, it is illegal. NYC health code prohibits "...keeping animals that are 'wild, ferocious, fierce, dangerous or naturally inclined to do harm'...." But in a city with a normal share of bumblebees, wasps, hornets, spiders, rats, cars, trucks (not to mention NYC taxis, busses, subways, gun-slinging cops, falling construction cranes and generally decaying infrastructure), I don't think adding a few honeybee hives to the mix will add any significant amount of danger to anyone's life there.

I think it is an excellent idea. Many people have properties that would provide good sites for bee hives. But few go to the trouble of keeping bees. Maybe the thought has never occured to them. Maybe they are sympathetic to the idea but don't have the resources or time to get started. I used to think of beekeeping as a rural activity; something to do in wide open spaces with plenty of room for the bees to roam. But when I saw the trees and bushes bloom in Virginia Beach this Spring (and it was eye-popping) all I could think was, "hives....here.....now"!

So maybe that will be my Winter project this year: to build a number of hives, contact homeowners in good locations and negotiate a way to keep a hive or two on their property the following Spring.

Tax Day Relief

Today is the deadline for filing Federal income tax. That sucks for many reasons. Not the least of which is that according to The Tax Foundation we will be working until April 23 of this year just to make the money to pay our taxes for 2008. The good news is that this is three days less than last year. The bad news is that it is because of the "tax rebate" checks - which is money we don't actually have but will borrow from ourselves and our descendants for a little pick-me-up right now. But maybe this will cheer you up for moment.



I don't know who they are but I know they make me smile. Enjoy.

More on Top Bar Hives

It is time for the inevitable Wikipedia Reference. Apparently, one of the first recorded TBHs was found in Greece in 1682, though they are thought to have been used for thousands of years before that. More recently TBHs were used in Africa as a replacement for hollow log hives. Their ease of construction and low cost made them accessible to many beekeepers and the idea made its way to the US in the 1980's.

There are two main types of TBHs: the Kenyan - with sloped sides, and the Tanzanian - with vertical sides. It is said that if you ask ten beekeepers, you'll get at least eleven opinions. This is just as true for TBH beekeepers. Except that ten TBH beekeepers may come up with at least eighteen to twenty opinions. If my research into Langstroth hives was like discovering a long list of scientific multiple-choice questions, my reseach into TBHs was like a long list of philospohical essay questions.

Fortunately I found Michael Bush. His writings on top-bar hives and about beekeeping in general reminded me a lot of Masanobu Fukuoka and his writings on agriculture. I like the idea that bees have been bees much longer than humans have been beekeepers and that the best thing a beekeeper can do is to give the bees a place to do their thing and get out of their way.

So I picked a few core concepts and ran with them. I like a screened open bottom, like on an IPM bottom board but I didn't want it to be full-width, because of the cold winters here, so that calls for angled sides. But I wanted some compatability with Langstroth deep frames, which requires vertical sides. (compatability, platform standardization, old habits die hard) That's how I wound up with the beveled-box look of my TBH. The sides are made up of four 48" lenghts of 1 x 10" planks. The top pair is mounted vertically on edge and the bottom pair are paralled but canted inward to make about a four inch wide opening that I covered with hardware cloth. If I can figure out how to do it from here, or if/when I migrate to my own web space, I will put up drawings of my TBH.

Tee Bee What?

You might say, "I know what a beehive is; its one of those white boxes, about so big, that the bees live in and that the beekeeper stacks one on top of the other. What is a top bar hive and why would one use it"? And you should be forgiven for asking it because until fairly recently I would have asked the same thing.

With all due respect to Reverend Langstroth, his work, his contemporaries and his many, many followers, there is another way of keeping bees. But at first glance one wouldn't know it. Last Fall, when I first opened the door into the world of beekeeping, I found a tangible, if at first daunting world of multiple choice questions: "eight-frame boxes or ten-frame boxes"? "solid or IPM bottom board and with or without a slatted rack"? "wood frames with wax foundation or solid plastic frames"? and on and on and on. The catalogs are wonders to behold; every product you could ever need for beekeeping. If you have a problem, they have the products to fix it. And if that solution causes another problem, they'll sell you what you need to fix that, too.

I started wondering if I was going to be able to afford my new interest - and how the bees could have survived before the beekeepers and the catalog companies came to their rescue. Don't get me wrong; I have nothing against any of the companies that sell to beekeepers. I expect to buy plenty from them in the future. But a kludgey system is a kludgey system - whatever it is. The more I read about Langstroth hives the more they struck me as the products of a few key concepts (beespace, removeable combs, variable interior volume, etc) with many years of ad hoc, reactionary fixes to problems that cropped up along the way. I began imagining scenarios that might happen with my hives and what sort of solutions I might try to use - but always within the precept of a Langstroth hive.

Enter Conrad Bérubé. It could have been any of a number of beekeepers, but I encountered Conrad's work first so I credit him for introducing me to the Top Bar Hive.



Links to the whole film epic:
beekeeping with the Kenya Top Bar Hive 1 - starting a smoker
beekeeping with the Kenya Top Bar Hive 2 - smoking the hive
beekeeping with the Kenya Top Bar Hive 3 - moving hive for inspection
beekeeping with the Kenya Top Bar Hive 4 - propolis and medicinal uses of hive products
beekeeping with the Kenya Top Bar Hive 5 - handling comb (Seen above)
beekeeping with the Kenya Top Bar Hive 6 - comb and mild vs. wild strains of bees
beekeeping with the Kenya Top Bar Hive 7 - unwanted guests
beekeeping with the Kenya Top Bar Hive 8 - getting stung
beekeeping with the Kenya Top Bar Hive 9 - sealed cells
beekeeping with the Kenya Top Bar Hive 11 - thanks to Hubert

The Bees Arrive - Part 2

Two members of our beekeepers' club were planning to drive out to Brushy Mountain to pick up their bee packages. They kindly offered to pick up orders for anyone else in the club, so on the afternoon of April 5 we went to their house, picked up our two boxes of bees and went to the site where the hives are. Now this is what we had been looking forward to:



But here is how it turned out to be:




As you can see from my assistants' clothes, it was a cold, grey, drizzly day that day and for most of the following week. The colony that I put into the Lang hive hunkered down and waited out the weather. But I made a fatal mistake with the TBH: I had not made the follower board for the TBH so when I poured them in I was pouring them into the full volume of the hive. It was effectively the same as pouring a colony into about two deeps and four supers - on their first day - in cold weather.

By the time I came back on the following Saturday, it was a disaster of pompeiian proportions. When I shovelled the dead out of the TBH, the few remaining survivors scattered and hopefully joined the other hive. I believe that if I'd had a follower board on hand and had placed it to give the bees only five or six frames worth of of space, they would have grouped back together and stayed warm long enough to make it through the cold spell. But such is hindsight.

So I won't be comparing a TBH to a Langstroth on a day-to-day basis. I do intend to put a split or a nuc into the TBH when I can get one but it won't be a direct a comparison as I had hoped for. The lesson for anyone thinking of building a TBH: don't put off making the follower board.

On a cheerier note, the bees in the Langstroth hive are thriving and I will post pictures of them soon. I will continue to follow their progress and deal with the topic of the Top Bar Hive from a more theoretical perspective.

The Bees Arrive - Part 1

So after months of reading, going to beekeepers' meetings, gathering & building equipment and thumbing through catalogs, my bees have arrived. First of all, the hives:



I have a Langstroth hive and a Top Bar hive. The Langstroth is just that, so I won't dwell on it here. But the TBH is my own adaptaion, based on other designs I have seen on the 'net. It is not a true Kenyan or Tanzanian TBH: I wanted straight sides tall enough to hold a Lang deep frame but I like sloped sides that end in an open, screened bottom. So I combined the two.



Above is a view of the inside of the TBH, looking at a temporary platform I put in to hold a bag of sugar solution. And below is another view looking up through the bottom screen into the hive from beneath.



The undersides of the top bars and their lines of wax are visible here. The wax lines are saw kerfs that I filled with molten bees wax (this is better explained elsewhere - I'll post a link when I find it again). But here's how mine look.

Square One

I was finally inspired enough to start my own blog by Weaseldog's videos, "Jack's Permaculture, pts 1 and 2" (see below). I intend to document my early forays into beekeeping. Specifically, I want to anecdotally compare a Langstroth-style to a Top Bar hive, both started from packages at the same time.