“Hey, check this out!”
I leaned over to where Raven had just separated the top bars in our beehive, exposing the comb. Near the center, a baby bee was chewing its way free. We both watched for a moment as a young bee emerged into the world – a drone from the size of the cell he was climbing from.
“Okay, get away from me. You are giving me too many of your bees!” Raven complained.
I sighed and returned to my end of the hive where I was carefully pushing top bars back together . . . doing my best to not squish any bees. Dying bees upset the hive, which was one of the last things we were trying to do with 50,000 bees swarming inches from our hands. My contingent of nearly 100 irritated bees buzzed around my veil and arms. Comparatively, today they weren’t being too aggressive at least.
“Come on girls, in or out,” I cooed trying to get bees to cooperate by wiggling the bars closer together and using gloved fingers to deter them from poking their heads between the bars. All the while, I did my best to ignore the aerial dance meant to deter me from bothering the hive. It wasn’t easy.
Raven had signed us up for beekeeping school early in the spring. After some research, he’d decided on a class on Top Bar Hives with Gold Star Honeybees. With Top Bar hives, the bees make their own wax unlike the traditional boxy Langstrom hives, where comb comes pre-printed on a manufactured wax layer. Analysis has shown that the manufactured wax contains trace amounts of chemicals. With Colony Collapse Disorder still in the news, we wanted to give our bees the best chance. To us, that meant keeping them as natural as we could. That is why we chose a Top Bar hive.
The class got us psyched to become novice apiarists. We ordered bees and a hive while looking for locations to place the hive. We didn’t really worry about the bee part until pick-up day in early May. As we hung out on Christy’s front porch waiting for our “mutt” bees to arrive via truck from Georgia along with dozens of other novice and veteran beekeepers, reality began to sink in. We were about to be given a box of 10,000 bees and one queen. We were supposed to know what to do with them!
It was exciting to be handed our box. A living mass of bees was balled in the center around the queen cage, all bees oriented horizontally. They shifted with an almost fluid consistency as we carefully carried the box back to the car for the drive home . . . during which we hoped no accident would release the 10,000 bees into the car. Not to worry, they buzzed softly the whole drive and that night, which they spent tucked in their box out of the way in our yurt. Installation was slated for the morning.
Top Bar hives do have their quirks. With bees building their own wax, you need to check to make sure they build it straight. You also have to get the bees from their delivery box into the hive. The idea is that you take the two end boards, known as follower boards, and place 10 top bars between them in the center of the hive. One follower board has a hole in it and a feeder is placed on the end next to this board. The queen cage is supposed to be taken out of the box of 10,000 bees and hung from a bar, so that the colony would free the caged queen.
The colony bees are installed by “gently” bonking the box of bees on the ground so that they fall into a pile, opening the lid of the box, and “pouring” the bees into the bowl shaped opening of the hive. Easy, right?
If you are an adrenaline junky, you need to try this. There is nothing like the rush that comes when you “bonk” a box full of 10,000 bees against the ground, open up the top, and try to pour flying insects with stingers into a hive. Zip lining in Costa Rica wasn’t this exciting! With mistakes like dropping the queen cage into the box of 10,000 bees (so that we had to reach in and get her out), accidentally releasing her (I’d rather that than the near squish I’d at first thought had happened), and Raven getting stung . . . in the eyelid, I couldn’t believe we managed to not only pull off getting the bees into the hive much less survived. I didn’t even get stung – that time. When all was said and done, I was pumped enough to wish we have more hives so that I could do it again. It is THAT good of a rush.
Fast forward three months and all our novice mistakes aside, somehow our hive is thriving. Their comb suspended from the bars, all straight thank goodness, had grown to nearly the far side of the hive. Bees build in one direction, so that meant we had 10 empty bars on the wrong side of the hive – and they were desperately needed on the other end where honeycomb was growing fat. Something had to be done.
It was early morning, before 7 am. We’d only had a cup of tea and a granola bar before suiting up to redistribute the bars in our Top Bar hive – a one time effort to move all the bars of brood and honey to one end so the hive would have more room to grow. Cicadas were already striking a chorus. It would be a hot day and we needed to finish before it got too warm. Beeswax is fragile above 80 degrees F and the last thing we wanted to do is damage any comb.
We’d discovered after comparing notes with other Top Bar beekeepers that our hive was a little aggressive. I admired the grit of our queen. She didn’t take disturbance well and had a great survival instinct. It was a great trait, just had drawbacks when it came to opening up her home and rearranging it. What woman would want that?
After the quick break while we watched a bee chew its way to life with irritated bees buzzing our veils, Raven and I worked to finish up. The hive was over half full, a great place to be in for mid-summer. It had been amazing to watch the hive grow, the bees instinctively building comb, gathering pollen and nectar, young bees being born. With the shuffle of bars finished, we shut up the hive and hurried off to let the hive resettle. If all went well, we’d never have to so rearrange THIS hive again . . . . But we are thinking of ordering more bees for next year. 🙂
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