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.