TBH with Straight sides... anyone ?

[Chiefman]

Does anyone here keep a TBH with Straight sides Tanzanian style.?

Do you find the comb is heavier and more prone to failure and detaching.
What about comb attachments on the inside

[Michael Bush]

>Does anyone here keep a TBH with Straight sides Tanzanian style.?

Yes.
http://www.bushfarms.com/beestopbarhives.htm#ttbh

>Do you find the comb is heavier and more prone to failure and detaching.

No.

>What about comb attachments on the inside

No more than sloped sides.
http://www.bushfarms.com/beestopbarhives.htm#attachments

[Chiefman]

Thank you Mr Bush    :-D
some very good points

So is there an advantage to sloped sides over straight? Is it just a trend or a movement that everyone is following blindly because "thats just how its done"?

Apart from combs and bars being a little heavier, the hive should have more room for the bees to expand. I was planning to build a TBH with straight sides and a 19" top bars.

[Michael Bush]

>So is there an advantage to sloped sides over straight?

As you lift out the comb the space around the comb increases with sloped sides.  It does not with square sides.  So it requires a bit (not a lot) more care when removing a comb from straight sides.

> Is it just a trend or a movement that everyone is following blindly because "thats just how its done"?

I actually made my first top bar hive back in the 70's with sloped sides before I knew of any other than the "Greek basket hive".  The literature of the time said that the basket was sloped and stated the reason that they would not attached comb to a sloped side.  I'm sure then the first KTBH was made they had read the same literature I had and, as I had, made the assumption, as I had, that it was true.

>Apart from combs and bars being a little heavier, the hive should have more room for the bees to expand. I was planning to build a TBH with straight sides and a 19" top bars.

I did one at standard deep depth (10 3/8" to allow bottom space) with 19" bars and on a strong flow they built a lot of combs very quickly and filled them very quickly and on a hot day they collapses.  Probably I caused it by opening them on too hot of a day, but it made me paranoid of having that deep of an unsupported comb.  When it collapsed it went down like a row of dominoes and I had to do a complete cutout to salvage it.

[Tomas]

I’ve run some horizontal/rectangular Tanzanian top bar hives both here in Honduras and in Wisconsin. I always had them as a combination of frames and top bars. If made with the dimensions of a Langstroth hive they can be started with a standard five frame nuc (which is what we did in Wisconsin). I would then slowly eliminate the frames in order to have brood combs made naturally by the bees on top bars. The frames might stay there or get eliminated (I didn’t want to use them for honey because of the miticides that were probably impregnated in the wax).

I would use new frames at either end, however. The idea was to be able to use my extractor on them. In Wisconsin they were normal Langstroth frames. In Honduras I made the frames with wide top bars to keep everything closed up since I work with Africanized bees here. These frames worked great for honey. I would also add some spacers between the frames so the bees could draw them out a bit fatter to aid in uncapping them.

You do need to handle the honey combs on the top bars of a Tanzanian tbh carefully. There is a lot of weight there and new honey comb is fragile. Like Michael mentioned, the burr comb attached to the side isn’t any worse than the trapezoidal tbh. You do have to make sure you cut it before lifting the comb out.

The comb in the trapezoidal Kenyan tbh is definitely more stable and easier to remove and insert. Since my Kenya tbhs are 12 inches deep, the amount of comb is pretty similar to the amount on a bar from the Tanzanian tbh.

Another disadvantage of the rectangular Tanzanian tbh is the amount of wood needed to make the floor. It adds expense. I can almost make two trapezoidal tbhs with the wood necessary for one rectangular tbh—because of the floor. Since the floor of the Kenyan tbh is much reduced, I can often get by sealing it up with scrap pieces of wood.

Go to my blog (link below) and see the first post for December, “Musings About Economical Beekeeping: Hives for Nothing, Bees for Free.” There are photos of these hives that I had in Wisconsin.

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Tom

[little john]

Does anyone here keep a TBH with Straight sides Tanzanian style.?

Do you find the comb is heavier and more prone to failure and detaching.
What about comb attachments on the inside

In his 1984 paper 'Beehive Designs for the Tropics', with regard to the KENYA TOP BAR HIVE, Townsend comments:
"The major drawback, which restricts its use to stationary-type beekeeping, is that the combs will break away from the top bar quite readily."

He then goes on to describe a method of supporting the comb with thin vertical sticks of bamboo or similar:
"When the comb is drawn out over these sticks, the comb will be strong enough to withstand transportation."

He then describes THE MODIFIED AFRICAN LONG HIVE, saying:
"The modified African long hive with movable frames is a very useful transitional hive for use with the tropical African bee. If the frames are made with sidebars and a median cross bar or a thin cross strip of wood or bamboo, the colony can be moved and the combs handled without breakage. This hive also has all the advantages of the Kenya top bar hive, at very little extra cost."


For myself, I have made every straight-sided Long Hive with rebates in the upper walls so that either Top Bars or Frames (or a mixture of the two) may be installed. This involves very little extra work for a huge improvement in flexibility. My only KTBH has now been dismantled and re-built with straight sides in exactly the same way. And - despite what some people are saying, LESS wood (pro rata), is required when building boxes of a larger volume, not more.

Thus far, I've been using standard Hoffman frames in these Long Hives, but I'm now moving over to the use of a 'framed Top-Bar'. The difference between these and the Hoffman frames lies in the form of the Top Bar, which will be solid and about an inch thick - so forming the top of the hive cavity - and as such, are only suitable for single-story Long Hive use.
These Top Bars will have a frame beneath them - which might seem a strange development of the Top Bar concept - but noting that Townsend recommends adding support to the combs, then why not have this support at the sides of the combs, and gain the additional advantage of dissuading the bees from making attachments to the hive walls ? 

Which seems like common sense to me. 

LJ