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.