Abuzz Over Top-bar Beekeeping
It’s funny how we can sometimes lose sight of the simpler ways of doing things. Top-bar beekeeping is an easier and more affordable method of raising bees, which can give you fresh honey and higher yields from your garden.
October/November 2009
An editorial from MOTHER EARTH NEWS
When it comes to building a more self-sufficient lifestyle, food is fundamental. You tell us, via our Editorial Advisory Group surveys, that you want gardening articles as much as, if not more than, articles on any other subject. In this issue, we cover two topics essential to growing your own food: winter food production using greenhouses and low tunnels, and a new, less expensive way to keep honeybees to pollinate your crops.
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As we report in Colony Collapse: Are Potent Pesticides Killing Honeybees?, honeybees are in big trouble, and nobody really knows why. Could be pesticides. Could be a new disease. Could be the malnutrition and stress that results from expecting bees to thrive on monocultured crops. Most likely it’s some combination of all these factors that is causing billions of bees to die mysteriously.
But if you grow a food garden, you need to have bees around. Even if you have no interest in the sweet honey they produce, you need them to pollinate many of your crops, including cucumbers, squash, strawberries, raspberries and even tomatoes. Because honeybees store their winter food in a form so delicious to humans, and because they are so good at pollinating so many different crops as they produce honey, humans have developed hive systems to maximize honey production and efficiently remove honey. But these systems can be pricey for home gardeners — upward of $200 for a hive body, frames and a starter batch of bees with a queen. These days, that’s not an investment everyone can make.
It’s funny how we can sometimes lose sight of the simpler, less expensive ways of doing things. For thousands of years before modern beekeepers invented those pricey hive systems, humans had been inviting bees to help in their gardens. So we were excited when we came upon an older, simpler way to keep bees near your garden — top-bar hives. Conventional hives depend on precise construction, using a set of wooden frames containing sheets of pre-formed wax that guide the bees to produce their honeycomb in a specific shape.
