Welcome to our backyard and our venture into beekeeping with Top Bar Hives in Colorado. Currently blogging from Coastal Virginia, we hope this site is helpful to you in your very own TBH adventure. — HB
It's message? It's time to super! Beekeepers, your job is to help your honeybees take advantage of the nectar flow, or what I like to call the "wax flow." For us top bar beekeepers, that means removing the follower board/false back if you haven't already and inserting bars. Warré beekeepers, whether you super or nadir, do it now so your bees can draw out lots of wax honeycombs. Here comes the honey!
Already forming tiny buds and the tell tale tongue (bract), the Linden trees will take all the moisture we've been getting and develop huge canopies of award-winning honey-producing blossoms, hail notwithstanding. It's been a tough June so far, and we have a long way to go before severe weather season is behind us. But stay positive and get your supers on today!
May is our rainiest month and this one did not disappoint. Thursday's hail storm took out quite a bit of the Honey Locust bloom, but I can already smell the SweeTarts® aroma of Russian Olives in the air. Your "supers" should be on so that the bees can take advantage of the nectar flow to draw comb. For us top bar beekeepers, now is the time to remove the follower board/false back if you haven't already and insert new bars. Warré beekeepers, whether you super or nadir, do it now. Here comes the honey!
Linden trees are the host plant for eriophyid mites, evidenced by leaf galls (red protrusion at left).
Already forming tiny buds and the tell tale tongue (bract), the Linden trees will need all of June to develop huge canopies of award-winning honey-producing blossoms. All the while, yellow sweet clover will sweep across undeveloped fields. This is your window of opportunity to get your bees to draw comb. Don't miss out. Get your supers on today!
The bees were beginning to beard, which means A) they're hot and/or B) they're crowded. Hot is a given. Looking in the window, crowded is a given.
I hadn't really thought about it when I bought the Survivor stock, being
interested in that particular aspect only, but these bees came from a
guy who sells honey for a living. So of course these bees are honey producers. In the State of the Hive picture you can see all the honey combs, braced to the window.
The bees haven't constructed any swarm cells, that we can see, and we don't want them to feel crowded lest they start thinking about it. It's been way too hot to harvest honey though, and the forecast isn't conducive to waiting, so we decided to super the TBH.
If only chamfered top bars worked as well as the Vortex Bee Escape. Within hours, all was quiet inside the super.
I really want chamfered top bars to work, but the bees insist on hanging comb from one side of the V only. And our girls prefer to make 2" thick honey combs so "standard" bar spacing just doesn't work. (Next year we'll space seven bars according to the marks left by the brace comb on the walls.) As it stands, not one of the combs in the super is properly attached to its top bar. This is one time I won't feel so guilty about crushing the comb to get the honey out of it.
Here are a few snapshots of our Summer Honey Harvest. Hover over each photo to reveal its caption.
Top Bar Hive management sometimes requires frequent honey harvests, especially smaller hives like ours. Our colony, however, is so brood-heavy they are using nectar as fast as it's coming in. We're pretty sure they're building up to swarm, and there isn't much honey at all. We pulled a comb that should've been full of honey but not only did it have brood on it, there were 2 queen cups, too. We're up to 9, at the very least. We're probably past the point of preventing a swarm at this point, but we're still hopeful.
For one thing, the shortage of honey could be good. Bees are not supposed to swarm unless there's enough stores for those left behind to get by on for a bit. When a colony swarms, many of the foragers leave (with their stomachs full of honey) and the nurse bees left behind to tend the developing brood aren't able to collect nectar themselves. They won't be of age to forage until their replacements emerge, so they need a stocked pantry. The bees know this, so (in theory) will only swarm if they're leaving behind an adequately provisioned hive and there's a nectar flow on, to ensure survival of both halves. I wonder if they know the Lindens, a favorite food source, are about to bloom.
Can you see the queen cups?
After harvesting honey, advice from the Natural Beekeeping Network is to split the hive, which means ending up with two hives in the Backyard. This is NOT an option. (We could also give some away, but that involves thinking and coordinating, strangers in the Backyard, and I'm not into that right now.)
With the discovery of more queen cups, we're a bit nervous. Even though another blogging beekeeper says, "Adding another box to a strong colony will not stop swarming," we gave them the Warré box to move into. They're supposed to put only honey in the super, but without a queen excluder it's possible that they will expand the broodnest upwards (yikes). Whatever they decide is up to them. All we know is that we have GOT to relieve congestion.
Immediately after supering, the main box looked less congested, so it appears that they are aware of the new space and did move up. If this works, they'll stick around as one huge colony and we'll have a bumper crop of honey easily harvested by simply pulling the super off. If it doesn't work, they'll swarm and we'll be lucky to have enough honey to pull them through another Winter.
