Beemaster's International Beekeeping Forum
BEEKEEPING LEARNING CENTER => TOP BAR HIVES - WARRE HIVES - LONG HIVES => Topic started by: beegardenbirder on July 16, 2012, 01:15:04 pm
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During a recent inspection I found that 21 of my 22 bars are completely drawn out and it looks like they all are about half brood with capped honey on the top. There are no bars of just honey... The hive is just over a year old, and has swarmed once. Will they move the honey around or do I not get any this year?
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Bees store honey over brood. Give them time to get honey bound and they will back fill brood area with honey. Or cut and tie. Cut out the honey and tie the brood back up. I would toss any drone brood. Honey over brood always. Makes a Lang hive look good now. Give them some time to back fill.
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My two cents...
IMO, brood bars (10 or 12) should be 1-1/4 wide and located nearest the entrance, honey bars should be wider at 1-5/8 to 1-3/4 and located furthest away from the entrance, presuming that the entrance is on the long side and biased to one end.
http://i865.photobucket.com/albums/ab218/Sunchaser01/DSCN0721.jpg (http://i865.photobucket.com/albums/ab218/Sunchaser01/DSCN0721.jpg)
Mine is just over a year old and I pinched a couple of bars about a month ago. One bar was all honey and one had maybe 20 drone cells that I cut and discarded. There were 3 or 4 more bars with honey visible, but I didn't want to be greedy and harvest more than I could use.
Have fun!
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"Or cut and tie. Cut out the honey and tie the brood back up."
Man, thanks for putting that up there. That is EXACTLY what I've been thinking about but haven't been able to convince myself was a good idea. I two bars of solid honey and probably 10 bars which were strictly brood combs but now they've deepened them at the top and started storing and capping honey. I think that's a perfect solution to make a cut right below the honey, cut the honey off the bar and then tie the bottom of the comb (brood) back up to the bar. They can do what they need with it without having to rebuild comb.
Thanks for the validation.
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I feel your pain. This is my second year with TTBH hives. The bees seem to work on all the frames at once and I get multiple frames with capped honey on the top half and uncapped on the bottom, but never a fully capped frame. Of course. I don't know how the drought is affecting all of this.
Last week I decided to take a mostly capped 3/4 frame of honey. 3 lbs of good honey, but I was really hoping to harvest several frames in June/July and let them work the fall for their winter feed. Oh well.
PS I have not feed them a drop of sugar since installing them last fall, so I feel good about them surviving on their own and confident when I take honey it is the real thing but realize it may be affecting my harvest quantity.
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"do I not get any this year?"
I have found that if you wine and dine the girls you may get...... oh, never mind. :-D
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I have never gotten signifcant honey from my topbars.....until this year, the first year they overwintered. Good luck!