I have a couple of friends (no, really, it's not me!) who are first year beeks and they are using top bar hives. They picked up two 3# packages and hived them last Friday. Both packages left the hives yesterday and didn't leave a forwarding address.
Is it more difficult to get a package to stay in a TBH vs a Langstroth hive?
Why would both swarm/leave within hours of one another?
Do you think something may be wrong with the design of the TBH?
>Is it more difficult to get a package to stay in a TBH vs a Langstroth hive?
No.
>Why would both swarm/leave within hours of one another?
I don't know. Did the inside of the hive have any strange smells? Like varnish? Paint?
>Do you think something may be wrong with the design of the TBH?
Bees are adaptable to most any shape void so unless the size was really huge I can't imagine what would be wrong that they wouldn't like other than if it had a bad smell of some kind.
Thanks, MB! I'll quiz them relative to what was used to paint the hives, if anything.
Other than that, I'm not sure of the dimensions but I'll check with them.
Four drops of lemongrass essential oil in the hive goes a long way to keeping a package from absconding.
Quote from: Two Bees on April 21, 2009, 09:13:32 PM
Thanks, MB! I'll quiz them relative to what was used to paint the hives, if anything.
Other than that, I'm not sure of the dimensions but I'll check with them.
Dimensions are really not important beyond the fact that bees will select a space ranging from 2-3 cubic feet in volume. Bigger is too big as it makes it harder for the bees to control temps, etc, within the hive. Smaller is too small as it's limited space would force the bees to swarm frequently and the swarms would be of small size and not likely to survive.
Rule #21. Never hive bees in a box that has been freshly painted or contains new right out of the box plastic frames. The fumes put off by both products will cause the bees to abscond.
Thanks, MB and Brian! I haven't actually seen these TBH that were built by these new beeks so I don't know about the painting yet. The lemongrass tip is a good one!
The new beeks tell me that they have one live queen left and a small cluster about the size of your fist. Last night, they built a "mini-TB nuc" that will hold five frames and put the queen and the remaining bees in that new box. They said there was a "tiny bit of comb" that has been built (burr).
My thoughts are to get some drawn comb in there so the queen will have somewhere to lay. But since it is a TBH, nobody has drawn comb to spare.
Another thought was to pull some Lang brood frames with bees from one of my second year hives and anchoring them somehow in the TBH.
Any suggestions?
You can cut the comb still attached to the top bar to fit your top bar hive and remove the end bars and bottom bar and cut the top bar from the langstroth frame to fit and screw it to the top bar for the top bar hive.
Thanks, MB!
Quote from: Two Bees on April 22, 2009, 10:07:22 AM
Another thought was to pull some Lang brood frames with bees from one of my second year hives and anchoring them somehow in the TBH.
That is exactly what I did. I built my TBHs so that I could fit a Langstroth deep wired under the top bars. I then moved nucs into them and slowly rotated out the Langstroth frames.
rob...