PRACTICAL BEEKEEPING Hive type
Top-bar hives with movable combs
Advantages
• These hives can easily be constructed even by village carpenters without woodworking machines • Only one measurement of importance ie the width of the top-bars • Comb size is uniform and manipulations involving the movement of combs from one place in the hive to another are easy • Combs and top-bars can be moved from one place to another in the hive so that only some combs are used for brood rearing, while other combs are used solely for honey storage • Examinations to check the health and wellbeing of the bees are quick and easy
Beesfor Development Journal 93
Disadvantages
• If NONE is entered here no-one will believe it, and that would expose the writer's liking for these hives! So some disadvantages have to be written: • Top-bar hives cannot be increased in size by adding extra hive bodies to accommodate extra large colonies • Cannot easily be transported safely when fully occupied because the combs hang freely and are not supported by wire or frames
Apiary with top-bar hives
Combs with honey above and brood below
LETTER
Mike Schmolke started beekeeping in 1965 with Langstroth frame hives, which were the only ones he knew about. Later he had a few Greek basket top-bar hives and in 1975 started keeping bees with top-bar hives. Mike was Government Apiculturist for nearly 20 years up to 1991 and has taught many beekeepers. He has organised beekeeping Mike Schmolke conferences, field days and meetings and has visited beekeepers in Botswana, Canada, Germany, Romania, South Africa and the UK. He has been involved with beekeeping development projects for rural beekeepers in Zimbabwe with assistance from USAID, NZAID and worked as a consultant on projects in Botswana, Malawi and Mozambique. Mike hires out 600 hives for crop pollination, harvests honey from 300 hives, purchases honeycombs from rural beekeepers who mostly use log or bark hives (up to 50 tonnes per annum ). He has taught village carpenters to construct top-bar hives, tinsmiths to make bellows smokers and rural women to sew simple bee veils.
Materials for top-bar hives
I read in BfD Journal 67 about the Gorongosa hive in Mozambique. This reminded me of the top-bar hives I made from four heavy sticks (two long, two short) that formed a rectangle. I wove split willows to form a half cylinder under the sticks. I left a hole at one end and coated the inside with straw soaked in wet clay slip. I put top-bars across the top and bees in the hives. I thought the clay soaked straw might move up with the combs which would mean mud in the honey. The bees however propolised the mud giving it the feeling of a hard surface, almost like ceramic and this prevented the straw coming up with the combs. The materials for these hives cost me nothing, the bees did well in them and, to my knowledge, are doing so still.
I have also made top-bar hives from stone adobe (soil moistened with water, with chopped straw or other fibres added for strength, then allowed to dry to the desired shape. The best adobe soil contains 15-30% clay to bind the materials together, with the rest being sand or larger aggregate). Plastic 55 gallon (250 litre) used barrels can be cut in half long ways to make two half cylinder hives from one barrel. I obtained the barrels from a local dairy. I was unsure if the bees would do well in these hives yet they have been occupying them for ten years!
This article continues the Modern Hives or Modern Ideas? debate from BfD Journals 90 and 91 – These, and an extended edition of this article are available on the Information Portal of the Bf D website. Mike Schmolke’s article first published in the Southern African Regional Honey Council Newsletter, September 2009
Important Check what has been stored in any barrels you obtain. If they have contained insecticides do not use them.
Leslie Crowder, USA
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