Improved top-bars

Issa Nombré, Joseph Issaka Boussim, Paul Schweitzer

Keywords: Africa, Apis mellifera adansonii, Burkina Faso, honey production, top-bar.

Since the start of a Burkina Faso Government project in 1987, new beekeeping practices have spread towards the western zone of Burkina Faso with the use of several types of hives. in the most well-known area there are top-bar hives, Dadant or Langstroth frame hives with supers, and a rectangular shaped hive with a horizontal extension. The two honey harvesting techniques used are filtration through sieves, or by centrifuge.

Colony productivity is dependent on several factors including the strength of the colony, the environment, melliferous flora and beekeeping practice. The latter is influenced by the type of hive used and the defensive nature of Apis mellifera adansonil. comparison of honey production from the A three hive types: top-bar, frame and rectangular frame hive, showed poor honey production from the frame hive and average production from the two other types of hive (Nombré, 2003). Difficulties of use were also noted for the frame hive concerning the use of high technology, bee escapes, hive tools, smoker, and also due to the massive exit of bees through open spaces between frames during harvesting.

The rectangular frame hive provides honey production comparable with that found by Villigres (1987) in Benin. Honeycombs supported at the four sides of the frame are solid and honey extraction can be done with a centrifuge. This makes it possible to have good quality honey and intact empty frames which can be returned to the hive. This hive can therefore be recommended for honey production for a broad scale programme. The frames are covered by small planks of wood and when one plank is removed during harvest, it leaves four frames and five spaces from which escaping bees rush out.

The top-bar hive is easy to work with because the bars are adjoining. When one bar is removed, the bees leaving from the small space (3 cm) are easy to control. It is therefore practical for the highly defensive tropical bees (Villiares, 1987; Hertz, 1994). The only difficulty could be that honey extraction is done by straining, which may involve loss of honey.

Because it is easy to handle, with a good production of honey, our idea is to transform the top-bars into a trapezoidal frame adapted to centrifugal extraction. These top-bar hives with trapezoidal frames called ‘improved top-bar hives’ are currently popular for a revival of beekeeping in Burkina Faso. This hive has the same dimensions as the top-bar hive (62.5 litres) with 24 trapezoidal frames of dimensions 542 cm’ each one. It is easy to use because it controls the exit of bees during honey harvest, and allows use of an extractor. The trapezoidal frame has an area slightly lower than that of the rectangular hives (680 cm}. An increase of the area of these frames is recommended for a greater effectiveness of this hive.

Changing top-bar hives to bring about ‘improvements’ is not a new subject and ts regularly debated. For a good example read Bernhard Clauss’s article Queen includers. the debate continues (BID Journal 26).

These articles are available on the BfD Website Information Portal topic Bee hives