How to Populate Your Non-Standard Hive

When I started keeping bees at the turn of the century the hive of choice here in the UK was National or WBC gold, if you had bigger ambitions Commercial. The Langstroth was considered unnecessarily American and anything made of straw was simply quaint at best and a disaster waiting to happen at worst. Now, less than 20 years later, we also have the Warré, the horizontal top bar hive, the Lazutin, the ZEST and other deep boxes, and for the straw lovers, some interesting variants on the skep. This has created two new problems for the beginner: which hive to start with and how to persuade the bees to enter it.

In those days it was easy: the Nacional was the preferred option due to its ubiquity. Those who liked the look of the WBC and weren’t put off by the extra work could still use the same frames, albeit less. You paid around £25 for an overwintered nuc and about double that for a hive and in no time you were a new beekeeper.

Somehow, in the intervening couple of decades, core prices have doubled, and doubled over and over again, and prices for wood items have increased as well, so that there is now a significant cost to start in the beekeeping. If you go the conventional route: You can expect to set up around £500 for a hive with bees and basic kit.

If you take the road less traveled and build your own top, vertical, or horizontal bar hive, you can certainly save money on hardware, but now you have another problem: how to get the bees into your hive, given that a standard 5 frame core it won’t fit in its oddly shaped box, and suitable nuclei are as rare as hen’s teeth.

When I first started teaching beginners about top bar ruffles, we used a pretty brutal technique we called “crop and chop”, which involved performing drastic, irreversible surgery on the frames and combs of a standard core to force it to fit into the trapezoidal shape of a horizontal top bar beehive. It worked reasonably well, but required a bee proof cover over and around the unarmed bars and was significantly tricky if a full brood frame had to be dealt with. A better method had to be found.

My standard advice was, and still is, if possible, start with a swarm. Ideally, start by attracting a swarm directly to your hive, as this provides strong evidence that by choosing to be there, they consider it high on their list of ideal homes and are more likely to thrive. Swarms can be attracted to hives by baiting them with an empty comb from another (healthy) hive, rubbing wax and propolis around the wood, and adding a few drops of my Magic Swarm Bait, which contains one part Geranium essential oil to two parts lemongrass oil.

The great thing about baiting swarms is that you can set up a number of boxes that are really just small hives (10-12 bars are good for a TBH bait box) and place them in several different locations to multiply your chances of success. What’s not so great is that you’re relying on bees to find your boxes, which is quite likely in an area that contains a fair number of beekeepers, but progressively less likely the further you get from civilization. If you’re more than a couple miles from other hives or wildlife colonies, your chances drop exponentially (I suspect you follow the inverse square law: your chances are inversely proportional to the square of the distance from the nearest apiary).

You can become proactive and present yourself as a swarm hunter, which can produce a better result, as long as you don’t mind dealing with multiple inquiries about bumblebees under sheds, hoverflies disguised as bees, and real bees that have taken up residence in chimneys. attics and walls. Not to mention wasps and hornets. Hopefully, at least once a season, you’ll be offered a football-sized main swarm, hanging from the horizontal branch of an apple tree, conveniently at shoulder height. This is the one to install in your horizontal top bar hive, pouring it into the box as if it were liquid, or placing it uphill on your Warré. These bees are in perfect condition to get you off to a good start: full of honey and enthusiasm, they’ll be busy building honeycombs and all you have to do is stare at them in amazement.

But assuming that the season is passing and no swarms have appeared. She desperately wants to get started and is seeing ads for cores, which she suspects are headlined by an imported queen. Or maybe a friend has bees at his National, which seem to have swarming ambitions. How can you get bees from the frames to the top bars without cutting the wood and brood? It’s possible?

Fortunately, it is not only possible, but quite easy to perform.

For a ‘standard’ top bar hive (with 17″ bars), you need temporary access to, or ownership of, a domestic hive brood box containing 5-8 good bee and brood boxes, with or without rearing. This can be a nuc that you have bought and placed in a full size brood box, or it could be a friend’s hive that you don’t mind me messing with another type of frame hive, as long as the bars in your TBH are the same length as the ones on the frame ruffle.)

The method is as follows:

1. Place the occupied hive (the one containing your core plus extra frames) in the exact spot where your top bar hive will later be located, with its entrance facing the chosen direction so that it is less likely to disturb you or your neighbors .

2. Separate the frames containing brood into pairs and place a top bar between each pair, restoring the space to normal. (This is why it starts with less than a full complement of frameworks.)

3. Leave it for 7-10 days, then carefully check the bars for combs. The bees will have drawn a straight comb on each bar, in which the queen will have laid eggs, some of which may have already reached the pupal stage. You may find the queen in one of the new combs.

4. On a sunny afternoon, move the busy hive several steps in any convenient direction and return the TBH to its previous position. You’ll notice the foragers return home, looking puzzled that their home has changed shape, but quickly finding the new entrance.

5. Carefully transfer the newly drawn top bar combs, with the bees attached, and place them side by side on the TBH, checking to see if the queen is on one of them. If it is, very good. If not, then you need to find her and move her to the new hive, being careful that she doesn’t leave.

6. You should now shake about half of the bees from the frame hive into the TBH, adding several bars to each side of the ones already there. Place the follower boards and close.

7. Close the frame hive, after adding new frames to fill the gaps created by removing the top bars.

You now have a queened colony in the top bar hive, with collectors bringing food as if nothing happened, and a queenless colony in the National, with the resources to become a new queen (check they have eggs and freshly born). emerged larvae). Unless there is a flow, I suggest feeding both colonies at this point – one needs to build a comb, while the other needs to draw a queen.

The principle we are exploiting here is the ability of bees to return to the exact point in space where they know their home is, or where they were when they left to look for food. This can be used to move bees from literally any hive to any other, as long as the new box can be substituted for the old one. The additional step of persuading them to construct suitable movable combs prior to transfer makes the process easier, but not essential. You may need to balance the populations in old and new colonies, which is where your judgment as a beekeeper comes into play.

Transferring a colony from the frames to a Warré could be done in a similar way, but you would have to make some special frames and mask off the areas on either side to prevent comb being built where it won’t fit. An easier method, especially during the build period, is to fit the National brood box on top of a Warré box, with a plywood “mask” in between to reduce the opening to 250mm and split boards on the National to prevent lateral expansion. . The entrance should be under the bottom box. The honeycomb builders will take care to allow for downward expansion, and if you place two or more boxes below the first, you can leave the National in place until it refills with honey. Adjust it, as the arrangement is inherently top-heavy.

A general principle that I found out the hard way is that there is no point in placing an empty box, even one containing starter strips of foundation, on top of an occupied hive. Most likely, they will refuse to start at the top and work their way down as you might expect, instead building combs up, and in all sorts of irregular shapes, from the top of the frames into the bottom box. The resulting mess will take you some time and probably a lot of curses to deal with.

It may have occurred to you that this process also has the effect of creating a practically free of Varroa new colony, as most of the mites will be sealed in the brood cells in the frame hive. (He can find out for himself how this can be adapted as a mite control technique.) On the contrary, this means that you may be accumulating a parasite problem in your hive frame, which may need to be dealt with before it becomes serious. However, the period of more than 3 weeks without new brood will work in your favor, because the mites will have a decreasing number of brood cells to occupy and will be exposed to simple biomechanical treatments, such as powdered sugar, as well as the activity of grooming of the bees themselves.

If you intend to move bees from the frames to the top bars regularly, as a service to your local beekeeping group, for example, it’s worth building a conversion hive for that purpose. This is simply a long frame hive, equivalent to at least two brood boxes side by side, housing a strong, even-tempered and prolific colony, whose job it is to build combs on the top bars placed between pairs of frames. With a steady supply of food, they’ll be able to build 3-4 starter combs per week from early to mid-summer without breaking a sweat, thinning out a bit later in the season. You will probably want to run this hive in conjunction with a modest queening program, so that you can populate the hives with a known heritage queen and not have to rely on emergency or swarm queens.

Sometimes we create problems for ourselves by trying to perform operations that our bees would rather we hadn’t thought of. Careful observation of bee behavior will save you from inflicting the worst of this on your colonies, but we fall for our ideas, so our teacher is usually the tough mistress called Experience.

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