Top Bar Hive Build.....

[Beekissed]

That's an excellent plan! That's what I wanted to do also when I had my bees....no chemicals and a return to a more feral style bee that doesn't need coddling to survive.

There's one site I liked that was a proponent of the TBH and of the more natural approach and he even posts his health certificates each year after he stopped treating for the varroa mites and you could see the progressive improvement of his hive health via the health inspection results year after year.

You might find his site very interesting because he has the same ideas you have: http://bushfarms.com/bees.htm

 

[FarmerD]

I've read mr bush's books and I follow a lot of his work.

 

[Beekissed]

I met him on a beekeeping forum once and fashioned my barrel TBH after one he had made and featured on his site. If I made another, I might even go with that style once again.

It's exciting, isn't it? Going into beekeeping and striking out in a direction that many do not go. I like that in all my farming/homesteading endeavors...I like doing things that make sense, not because others may be doing them or feel like it's the best way.

I attended a beekeeping conference at a local university once and there wasn't a thing there I found of any interest...just the same old stuff regarding the same tired beekeeping in Langstroth hives, medicating the bees, feeding the bees HFCS, etc. Not one lecturer or literature there said anything about keeping bees in a more sustainable fashion. I left early and never attended another one.

I'm a little interested in this Rose Method https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMcBiCcuC8w simply because the man makes sense but I'm also thinking of how to incorporate the strips of premade comb at the tops of my bars to encourage more strength to the base of my honeycomb in that way. Just speculating on that but not sure.

 

[Beekissed]

Have you seen this? Just saw this for the first time and haven't got a chance to study it to see what the long term ramifications~if any~would be...
http://www.honeyflow.com/

http://www.honeyflow.com/faqs/p/22

 

[FarmerD]

It's exciting, isn't it? Going into beekeeping and striking out in a direction that many do not go. I like that in all my farming/homesteading endeavors...I like doing things that make sense, not because others may be doing them or feel like it's the best way.

it is both equally exciting and terrifying. the wife and i are trying to shift into this homestead/self sufficiency/ farming as both a lifestyle and a profession. due to our lack of traditional farming background, we are definitely coming at this from "outside the box". one of the main tenants of our farm plan is that it all has to work together, thus strengthening the whole. a positive self reinforcing loop if you were. not all the components of the farm will be for profit, some will be for the benefit of the farm itself...... we wish only to skim the most profitable cream off the top to make a modest living from the labor we, personally, are able to provide.

I attended a beekeeping conference at a local university once and there wasn't a thing there I found of any interest...just the same old stuff regarding the same tired beekeeping in Langstroth hives, medicating the bees, feeding the bees HFCS, etc. Not one lecturer or literature there said anything about keeping bees in a more sustainable fashion. I left early and never attended another one.

i feel the same on this topic, but my wife thinks we should attend and make our presence and intentions know since we will be selling bees in the community. i see the merit of both perspectives. i have a patience problem with the type of "newbee" that shows up for these type of events. it seems this same personality type is the main component of alternative farming/permaculture events also. once the meeting or presentation devolves into the "i have a hive and why did such and such happen?", dark unmentionable thoughts creep into my mind. it blows my mind how many people out there just want you to give them a check list of things to do, or better yet, just tell them exactly what to do rather than researching, learning, and experimenting for themselves. being out on my own, with a hive noone uses forced us to learn. we learned more about bees and bee behavior in our first year than my mother in law has learned in 12 years of keeping langs. it continuously blows her mind that we know and understand whats happening and what needs to happen, but she is so intrenched in the "someone told me so and so once" mindset that she unwilling to even try new techniques. for example, she is firmly against finding the queen and moving her and bees to a new hive to make a split. she believes that if you take out the queen, the original hive will die. in her mind, she knows the queen leaves with the swarms that are cast when she does nothing and that the remaining hive is queenless, but if you try and tell her how to create and artificial swarm so she doesnt have to climb a tree to get them back, she immediately reverts to the "the hive will die without a queen". this is not a stupid woman. she graduated college, became a psychologist, and is a diligent reader...... but i digress. i could go on and on about the current state of beekeeping and beekeepers and how it got us exactly where we didnt want to be, but i would just be ranting.

I'm a little interested in this Rose Method https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMcBiCcuC8w simply because the man makes sense but I'm also thinking of how to incorporate the strips of premade comb at the tops of my bars to encourage more strength to the base of my honeycomb in that way. Just speculating on that but not sure.

plenty of people around here use all medium supers in their hives..... alot of them do some foundationless frames too, i didnt know this was a "method". i guess someone had to put a name on it. we use a triangle shaped cleat on our topbars and the strength seem just fine. i believe your buddy micheal bush is against the strip of foundation..... says the bond is not as strong as what the bees would build themselves. i'd have to dig through the sight again to find that though. i have no experience with that style.

Have you seen this? Just saw this for the first time and haven't got a chance to study it to see what the long term ramifications~if any~would be...
http://www.honeyflow.com/

http://www.honeyflow.com/faqs/p/22

its been all over my facebook feed, and im against it. people that keep bees need to inspect their hives and be more "hands on". im not one who thinks we should just shake a package into a hive and never come back. if you learn whats happening in the hive, and have a general idea what should happen, then you are a benefit to the bees, not a hindrance. if you dont know what the condition of the hive is on the inside, how do you know that taking a frame of honey wont be detrimental to the bees? if you secretly steal honey from behind the capped cells, then when are the bees going to realize this? ...... halfway through winter when theyve clustered around that particular frame and begin to uncap the empty comb? not to mention the robbing you would set off when you start using your hive as an extractor. to each his own, but you wont ever see this type of contraption in my apiary.

 

[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

 

[Beekissed]

Wow! Sure does! You have a major big plan going on there. Can't wait to see all the pics and hear you tell about all the different things you are doing at your place as you get each one accomplished.

I love the precision and beauty you have created with your TBH bodies.

 

[FarmerD]

Thanks. I should be getting more pics of the hive build soon. Gotta pic up the material for legs today, but can't do any more assembly until I go pic up the roof metal. On a side note, the bees are quite active today

 

[FarmerD]