Getting A Top Bar Hive Ready For Winter

Reader Contribution by Kim Flottum
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I’ve been closely watching the bees in our top bar hive the past few weeks, as winter approaches. Their comb building behavior changed about the end of August, from the straight and narrow and well defined, to a somewhat more erratic pattern, with individual combs attached to 2 or sometimes 3 top bars. If you catch them early they are easy to remove, realign or straighten, if not…and sometimes my attention gets stretched across too many projects…not unlike the combs…they can go several directions all at once and major reconstruction is required. This is, as you can imagine, troublesome for the bees, and for the beekeeper, certainly another reason to keep on top of things, no matter the beehive you’re working with.

The population of bees is small in our top bar hive. Certainly not the 40,000 or more like the 10-frame Langstroth hives have in the middle of September, which is down from the maybe more than 60,000 in July. Even our 8-framers are larger, but not as populous and the 10-frame giants. I’m often asked how you estimate the population and contents of a colony…adults, brood, eggs, honey. For hives with frames it’s pretty easy. I’ve developed a fairly good sense of how many cells each size of frame has for the mediums, and the very few deeps, which are all I use. A Langstroth frame is right about 90 cells wide…it varies depending on the manufacturer, but that’s a good estimate. Medium frames then are about 30 cells tall, again, depending on the maker. That gives about 2700 cells per side, or about 5400 for a frame. With not a lot of practice, you can begin to accurately estimate the percent of space open and sealed brood occupys on each side of a frame, and from there the actual number of individual cells inhabited…in the brood stage…that are on that frame.  That tells you how many more bees there will be in a few days, or a couple of weeks or so in the hive. And, most hives have bees, brood and honey on only some of the frames of each box…this isn’t an all day task, you know.

Deep frames are right about 50 x 90 cells for about 9000 cells/frame. If you recall, there are about 10,000 bees in a three pound package (about 3200 bees per pound)…so a single deep frame can almost raise one of those three pound packages you can buy…for about $90 or so next spring.

Those figures are easy. But the top bar hive of course has a truncated triangle shaped comb…that is a triangle with the point removed…so the top and bottom are parallel, with the bottom about half as long as the top with sides sloping in at…ahhhh…there’s the rub…the angle and the depth of the comb. Well, my math hasn’t kicked in yet to give me the dimensions, and the cell numbers of each of the combs on our top bar combs, so I’m guessing at best on the amount of brood and honey on each comb.

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