How to Populate Your Non-Standard Hive

When I started raising bees at the turn of the century, the hive choice here in the UK was National or WBC or, if you had higher ambitions, Commercial. The Langstroth was considered unnecessarily American and anything made of straw was simply picturesque 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.

In those days it was easy: the National was the preferred choice due to its ubiquity. Those who liked the look of the WBC and were not put off by the additional work could still use the same frames, albeit less. You paid around £ 25 for a winter core and roughly double for a hive and in an instant you were a new beekeeper.

Somehow, in the intervening two decades, core prices doubled and doubled over and over again, and the prices of wooden items also increased, so now there is a significant cost to start beekeeping. If you go the conventional route: You can expect to pay around £ 500 for a hive with bees and a basic kit.

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

When I first started teaching beginners about upper bar urticaria, we used a pretty brutal technique we called “slash and cut”, which consisted of performing drastic and irreversible surgery on the frames and combs of a standard core to force it to fit. to the trapezoidal shape of a horizontal top bar hive. It worked reasonably well but required a bee proof covering over and around the framed bars and was significantly messy if there was a full brood frame to deal with. A better method had to be found.

My standard advice was, and still is, if possible, start with a swarm. Ideally, start by baiting a swarm directly into your hive, as this provides strong evidence that by choosing to be there, you are considered one of the first on their list of ideal homes and are more likely to prosper than not. Swarms can be attracted to hives by priming them with an empty honeycomb from another (healthy) hive, rubbing wax and propolis around the wood, and adding a few drops of my Magic Swarm Bait bait, which included a part of geranium essential oil. in two parts. lemongrass oil.

The great thing about swarm bait is that you can set up a series of boxes that are actually just little hives (10-12 bars are good for a TBH bait box) and place them in several different places to multiply your chances of success. What’s not so great is that you trust the bees to find your boxes, which is highly likely in an area that contains a good number of beekeepers, but less and less likely the further you get away from civilization. If you’re more than a couple of miles from other hives or wildlife colonies, your chances decrease 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 act as a swarm catcher, which can produce a better result, as long as you don’t mind dealing with multiple inquiries about bumblebees under sheds, floating flies disguised as bees, and real bees that have settled in chimneys. dormers and walls. Not to mention wasps and hornets. Hopefully, at least once a season, you’ll be offered a top-notch swarm the size of a soccer ball, hanging from the horizontal branch of an apple tree, conveniently at shoulder height. This is the one you need to install on your top horizontal bar hive, pouring it into the box as if it were liquid, or going up a slope towards your Warré. These bees are in prime condition for you to get off to a great start – full of honey and enthusiasm, they will be busy building honeycombs and all you need to do is stare in awe.

But assuming the season passes and no swarm has appeared. You desperately want to get started and are seeing ads for cores, which you suspect are headed by an imported queen. Or maybe a friend has bees in his National, which seem to have swarming ambitions. How can you get the bees to go from the frames to the top bars without cutting the wood and brooding? Is it even possible?

Luckily, it is not only possible, but quite easy to do.

For a ‘standard’ top bar hive (with 17 “bars), you need temporary access to or ownership of a national hive rearing box containing 5 to 8 good frames of bees and brood, with or without a super honey. This can be a core 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 playing with (I must say, this operation can also be performed as It is described using Langstroth or any other type of frame hive, as long as the bars of its TBH are the same length as those of the frame hive).

The method is as follows:

1. Place the occupied hive (the one containing your core plus additional frames) in the exact location where the top bar hive will later be located, with its entrance facing in your chosen direction so that it is less likely to cause inconvenience to you or his 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 you start out with less than a full complement of frames.)

3. Leave on for 7-10 days, then carefully check the bars for combs. The bees will have drawn a straight honeycomb on each bar, in which the queen will have laid eggs, some of which may have already grown to the pupal stage. You may well 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 place the TBH in its previous position. You will notice that the pickers return home, looking perplexed that their home has changed shape, but they quickly find 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 in one of them. If so, very good. If not, you must find it and move it to the new hive, taking care that it does not take flight.

6. Now you need to shake about half of the hive bees from the frame into the TBH, adding several rods on either side of the ones already there. Lay out 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 queen-right colony in your top bar hive, with foragers bringing food as if nothing happened, and a colony without a queen in the Nacional, with the resources to become a new queen (check they have eggs and newly … emerged larvae). Unless there is a flow, I suggest you feed both colonies at this point – one needs to build a honeycomb, while the other needs to draw and make 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 went looking for food. This can be used to move bees from literally any hive to any other, as long as the new box can be replaced with the old one. The extra step of persuading them to build suitably mobile combs prior to transfer makes the process easier, but not essential. You may need to balance populations in old and new colonies, which is where your judgment as a beekeeper comes into play.

Transferring a frame colony to a Warré could be done by similar means, but you would have to make some special frames and cover up the areas on both sides, to prevent a comb from being built where it won’t fit. An easier method, especially during the build-up period, is to place the National brood box on top of a Warré box, with a plywood ‘mask’ in the middle to reduce the opening to 250mm and division boards on the National to avoid lateral expansion. . The entry should be below the bottom box. The comb builders will take care to allow for downward expansion, and if you place two or more boxes under the first one, you can leave the National in place until it is refilled with honey. Tie it down, as the arrangement is inherently heavy on top.

A general principle I discovered the hard way is that there is no use placing an empty box, even one containing starter base strips, on top of a busy hive. They will most likely refuse to start from the top and work down as you would expect, instead building combs up and in all sorts of irregular shapes, from the top of the frames to the bottom box. The resulting disaster 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 virtually varroa free new colony, as most mites will be sealed in brood cells within the hive frame. (You can find out for yourself how this can be adapted as a mite control technique.) Conversely, this means you may be storing a parasite problem in your frame hive, which you may need to fix before it escalates. However, the period of more than 3 weeks without new brood will work in your favor, because the mites will have fewer and fewer brood cells to occupy and will be exposed to simple biomechanical treatments, such as powdered sugar, as well as to grooming activity of the bees themselves.

If you intend to move the bees from the frames to the top bars on a regular basis, as a service to your local beekeeping group, for example, it is 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, level-headed, and prolific colony, whose job it is to build combs on the top bars placed between pairs of frames. With a constant source of food, they will be able to build 3-4 starter combs per week throughout the summer from early to mid-summer without breaking a sweat, cutting back somewhat later in the season. You’ll probably want to run this hive in conjunction with a modest queen rearing program, so that you can populate hives with a queen of known heritage and not have to rely on emergency queens or swarms.

Sometimes we create problems for ourselves trying to perform operations that our bees would rather we had not thought of. Careful observation of the behavior of bees will save you from inflicting the worst on your colonies, but we fall in love with our ideas, which is why our teacher is usually the tough lover called Experience.

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