Top Bar Hives — It's All About the Wax!!!

Reader Contribution by Christy Hemenway

 Hi Kim —
I’m playing catch up with blog posts – We’ve had our first snow here in Maine – just in time for Halloween, which sent me out to my bee yard to take winterizing pictures.  So we’ll fire off two in a row here…

What you described in your recent post (but one) is one of the reasons I say “It’s all about the wax!”

In a first year top bar hive, an important task for the beekeeper is to monitor the building of comb inside the hive.  A top bar with an effective comb guide is essential to this process, but no comb guide works perfectly every time – so the management of it is up to the beekeeper, and (gasp!) the bees.

Here are some things we’ve found very helpful in keeping your bees on the straight and narrow:

Having a full bar of comb (or more than one!) to start.  Of course, this is more easily said than done when one is first starting out with a brand new top bar hive.  When I began in 2008 I had nothing but five bare wood hives and some packages of bees, with a hint of lemon grass essential oil to entice them to stay put and build wax.  It was hard going!

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