Top Bar Hive Build.....

[FarmerD]

here are some pics on the 24 TBH build i got going on right now. still have a few things to get and some more painting to do to finish up.

 

[FarmerD]

got me a swarm! nothing brings me joy like free bees!

 

[Beekissed]

I was wondering the same thing about those flow contraptions...I can just see a bunch of city/urban folk thinking that you can just set a hive in the yard and have honey on tap and it's all that easy. They want it handed to them the way it is..... can't you see all the entitled lazy folks getting one of those cutesy hives and a tap for their back yard?

I agree about the newbees that want someone to do the research and work for them so they can just get bees and get them fast and have some honey to show how self-sustainable they are in their backyard. The same thing is happening right now with chickens....they want them and they want them NOW, and they want you to tell them every little thing, write it down, with details and specifics, please, so they can just start doing chickens.

Chickens, like bees, takes some hands on experience and you simply cannot learn either one from a single book or website, nor can you really own the information unless you've applied it yourself for some period of time to see what works and what doesn't. One of the most popular selling chicken books out there was written by a college professor that only had chickens 3 yrs and never did any of the hands on work with them herself, she just gathered a bunch of USDA approved drivel about chickens and put them into a well known publisher's book and now is quoted as gospel by all and sundry newbie chickens owners.

I suspect it's much the same with bees by now....so many new books and websites since I was researching them some 10 yrs ago.

What other homesteading type endeavors are you doing there on your farm to augment your bee farming? Other animals/crops as streams of income?

I think the Rose Hive method refers to where he replaces the supers to provide more space, with a theory that placing them always at the top requires the bees to move honey from a super at the bottom to that top one to make more bee space for the brood cells at the bottom and placing those strips instead of entire sheets of comb in alternating frames allows the bees to build whatever size cell they want in that frame, so encouraging more brood production. You'd have to watch it to get the gist of it, but he was saying his bee colonies have more bees with this approach and they can produce more honey due to these few changes in how the super is setup and where it is placed in the set.

 

[FarmerD]

What other homesteading type endeavors are you doing there on your farm to augment your bee farming? Other animals/crops as streams of income?

thats a question with one helluva long answer.,

for a little background, we bought our land about 3 years ago, and had been piddling around trying to clean up the mess the loggers left when they cut it just before we purchased it. back two novembers ago, we started our crazy little off-grid cabin build, but we still havent finished it enough to live in it just yet. we started with bees because it was something we could set up and let alone except for weekend and the occasional weekday afternoon intervention. it will only be a sideline business for us. our main sell will be blueberries and blackberries. our plan is to have a large portion of the property in a perennial food forest type setup woven into the remaining native forest with alittle less than 10 acres devoted to a diverse blueberry and blackberry crop. surrounding the berries will be an "engineered" savanna including many tree and shrub berry/nut crops such as hazelnuts, elderberries, figs, muscadines, persimmons, etc and additional bee forage crops like mimosa and locust trees. we wont be able to pick all the fruit when it really gets going, but we will be able to hand pick the best fruits each season for local retail sale. we will also offer a small CSA subscription and farmers market sales to take advantage of the work we will already be doing to raise our own vegetables/grains/herbs etc by expanding our personal gardens to market garden size and doing some small scale field production. we will be working cows and poultry into our soil building routine as well as for our own personal meat production and possible retail sales. some other goals include: having as diverse and long seasoned bee forage as possible, utilizing our former river bottom topography to raise rice on a small scale, and working multi species cover crops into our rotations for both soil health and insect diversity. i could go on and on..... its an never ending and constantly evolving project on a scale i have never attempted before.

the over arching goal could be simplified down to an operation that is as close maintaining itself with as few outside inputs as possible. also, being that there are only 2 of us, we must focus our limited labor in the places it will have the most effect and do the best we can to plan and implement the rest in such a manner that it maintains itself as much as possible. hopefully that gives you an idea of where we are heading

 

[FarmerD]

ok now for more pics.......

take a milled top bar blank......

add some glue and a cleat......

staple away......

add completed topbars to the hive body, throw the legs, spreaders, and divider boards inside, and staple the bar stops on. this is how im transporting the hives out to the farm. they take up a lot less room in the truck this way.

six hives ready to take the truck ride out to the farm/apiary for final assembly and setup.

 

[Beekissed]

I want to thank you for all the wonderfully clear and good pics of this whole process...I know it takes extra time to take them and upload such things. A person can talk about such things on these forums and a person kinda has an idea of what they are describing but a set of pictures that show all the steps and parts, then the completed project, is just such a gift.

I'm a very visual learner, so these are just wonderful to me!

 

[FarmerD]

You might have mentioned this before and I forgot, but will you be moving these hives frequently to fields and crops where they can be used as pollinators and have food or will they pretty much stay in one place most of the time? I know you had mentioned transporting them and doing so with the legs off and such....are the legs easy to break down for that purpose or do you have to remove a lot of screws and such? If so, would having a fold up/down leg setup work...sort of like the folding metal sawhorses they have now?

these hives will rarely move. the reason i left the legs off is so i could carry 6 hives instead of 2 the 25 miles out to the farm. when we first started with bees, our tiny tractor had died and we had to borrow one to mow the thick brambles down just to have somewhere to place them. for that reason, we picked the easiest places to get to and mow. now we have an awesome tractor that allows us to clear areas that will be dedicated apiaries. in the pics above im using the tractor to lift and move empty hives to a staging area for placement into a new apiary. eventually all the hives will find new permanent homes. the goal is to have several smaller apiaries tucked into the landscape around the farm with 2 dozen or so hives in each apiary. im still crunching the numbers to figure out 1) how many hives the 2 of us can reasonably keep up with 2) what ratio of 4' hives to 2' nucs to keep that will give us the most 3lbs splits with queens to sell, but also keeps us in a position of being able to rebuild in a year if something catastrophic occurs and 3) how much of the farms income should we generate from the bees. bees are alot of work, but i know we can sell all the packages and queens we could make. i havent formally finished the business plan yet, but $50k seems very attainable assuming decent weather conditions and normal pest/disease pressures. all that business would occur between march and may, freeing up the rest of the year for other pursuits.

as to the folding legs..... i have considered several options on the legs. the strongest, most reasonable option that wouldnt increase the cost and time to build severely would be to build the legs as separate units using a jig and bolt it to the hive from the outside. i could then pull the bolts and leg assemblies and slide the hive bodies in the truck. problem is, i dont plan to move these..... and any addition to the build time is a pain. not to mention, they only weigh about 65-75 lbs empty, but closer to 200 or more loaded with bees and honey. handling 200 lbs of angry bees in a TBH is nearly an impossibility. you really have to be careful not to jar it causing the comb to collapse. it appears to be a somewhat legit way to move them with the loader though.... the hive can swing slightly reducing the chance of shock..... still needs some work to perfect though. i still may switch to the removable leg "units" going forward to make replacement easier though. the legs are the thing i think will fail first due to the eventual rot that will occur at the bases.

 

[FarmerD]

I gotta say I love all the pictures and details! Are these very heavy and how many of the divider boards do you put inside of each hive? It looks like on the first set that you have quite a few but in the second set it looks like they are more separated with one every so many inch's...

each hive will have 2 movable divider boards to control the internal size of the hive and 2 entrances on opposite ends of the hive. this gives me the option of running 2 smaller colonies in one big box or i can close off one entrance and just have one colony in the box. the smaller hives have been coined "nucs" or nucleus colonies. they tend to over winter well due to the smaller amount of bees/brood and also can be used for raising queens, making splits, repopulating winter losses, selling for profit, etc. last year we built 2' long hives for nucs, and even though they are quite convenient for transporting, they are a pain in the arse to work, they dont have a built in stand, and the economics for having a bunch and fixing the above problems dont work out...... thats why we are switching to all 4' equipment and putting 2 nucs in one 4' hive. i hope some of that makes sense.

the empty hives weight about 75 lbs but balloon to 200 or more loaded

 

[frustratedearthmother]

DH has expressed some interest in beekeeping... I would love it but I've got enough on my plate... I'll live vicariously through ya'll!

 

[FarmerD]