Top Bar Hive Beekeeping

An unconventional way of keeping bees, but is heavily used in third world developing countries where there is a lack of materials and money.
Although it is thought to be a natural way to keep bees, nature doesn't provide trunks or holes in rocks with removable top bars, but it must be said that Top Bar Hive Beekeeping is the nearest to natures way of keeping bees, if you want to use removable combs.

Unfortunately, if you want honey from a TBH, you have to destroy everything that the bees have spent months making, as you have to crush the combs to extract the honey. The bees then have to start from scratch again where as with conventional bee keeping in standard hives, you only extract the honey from the combs and then put them back in the hives, saving the bees all that time and work making new ones.

Top Bar hives have been around for many hundreds of years whilst man strived to improve bee keeping methods but in recent years, they have been resurrected as being 'green and natural'.

Top Bar Hives produce less removable honey compared to conventional hives, but because you are crushing the comb, more wax. They are produced in two configurations, either vertical construction such as the Warré and horizontal ( long boxes ) such as the Kenyan and Cornish.

It is difficult to produce top bar hive nucs as the bars vary in size according to the type of hive and as they don't consist of any foundation, comb produced solely by the bees is very fragile. Bees in a Top Bar Hive with sqaure sides will join the edges of the combs to the side, thus making it impossible to remove the combs unless you free the combs from the sides. Bees in a vertical TBH also join the combs together, vertically.

HOW WE CAN HELP

Besides supplying queen bees and standard nucs ( nuclei nucleus ) for British Standard Nationals, WBC's etc, we produce 5 bar TBH nucs to your specification, either on bars produced by us or your own bars.

This gives your new Top Bar Hive a flying start compared to putting either package bees ( loose worker bees with a queen or queen cell ) or a unknown swarm in your empty hive.

Some UK Suppliers of Top Bar Hives