Top Bar Hive Walkthrough- Pros and Cons

Top bar hives are my favorite style of bee hive. I wanted to give my experience using top bars. This includes dealing with cross combing, expanding the brood area, hive maintenance, and honey production.

Here is a link to Rickey Roark's Horizontal Hive Video:

[trasure]

I wouldn’t shorten your videos at all! I appreciate the time well spent, you are chill and thorough. Very easy to follow and learn from, thank you!

[penellegrand]

So calm. No smoke. Not even a spritz of water. Amazing! Bravo!

[benstewart]

Very helpful video. Thank you from across the pond 😊

[efngepic]

I really appreciate the break down and explination of a Top Bar hive. Im looking to start a Hive this year and you conrifmed my desire.

[horizontalbees]

Ralph, thank you for the shout out on your channel. Sorry I’m so late to respond but my super horizontal swarmed on me yesterday day. This was very unexpected and I had no equipment ready, because I set 7 swarm traps. My wife and I watched all your video and it was very good. My wife keep asking me questions about the top bars and I keep shhhhing her and told her to listen to you... 😂 .. Yes I got punched.

[kennapennington]

Our local groups only do vertical hives, but we have an opportunity to use some top bars at a low price and needed to know if it was worth it! We prefer to keep it all natural, and love that this looks like a good option for us. Thanks for all the info!

[freenewlife]

As a new beekeeper, preparing to start my first Topbar Hive, this was so helpful! Thank you! 🐝🍯🥰

[tylerwilson]

Really great it taught me a lot and it’s awesome to see how calm you bees are

[danno]

You’ve done this very well — thank you! I’ve subscribed! Thanks much appreciated…

[annjurczyk]

Very helpful. Thank you for explaining what we’re looking at when looking at the comb (nurse bees, drones, etc.). I have bees building comb on the follow board when we started with 8 boards, added 3 more boards because think they have run out of room? So much to learn.

[evonnewhalen]

Thank you for sharing your videos and knowledge. I have a Topbar hive and actually answered a couple of my questions before I had a chance to ask them. I will definitely keep watching your videos. Thank you Evonne

[theldor]

Thanks for sharing the beautiful video.

[cornerstonehoneybees]

Good video - just a couple of things to add
1) Yes, most of the comb is collected using crush & strain. But if you are selling the honey, selling "comb honey" is much more profitable than bottled honey. So rather than cut the comb into a bucket, if you can bring it back to the house on the bar, you can use your knife to cut it into the size of the plastic trays you sell comb honey in. Honey sold this way sells for about twice the price (per ounce) as bottled honey.
... and yes, you can do cut-comb honey from Langstroth hives too (just don't put foundation in the frames of the honey super).

2) I wish you would have mentioned the downside to doing crush & strain - you destroy the comb. Bees have to eat ~7 lbs of honey in order to make 1 lbs of bees wax. In a Langstroth hive, you can de-cap the honey, spin the honey out of the comb, and give the comb back to the bee's to re-use. Doing this can GREATLY increase the amount of honey you can collect.

3) you have some bad information when talking about cell size and mites. Mites reproduce inside capped cells - since drone larva are capped for 3 days longer than workers, more mites are produced in drone cells than worker. It is the length of time the cell is capped that is the bigger factor. Cell size is not nearly as important.

4) the 21 minute mark would have been a good opportunity to talk about one of the advantages that Langstroth hives have over TopBars - when the hive runs out of room, you simply add another box to the Lang hive. You can't do that with a TopBar. That means you can allow your hives to get MUCH bigger (bigger generally means healthier).

[Bawerdi]

thank you for making time and sharing us such amazing momments,
i would appreciate it if you could write down the inner dimensions of your top bar beehhives.

[blujen]

I like the Cathedral Hive design because it gives 3 sides of support to the comb. The downside appears to be manual processing altho there has to be a way to stabilize the other end to take the centrifugal force of a spinner. I'm.partial to the long hive designs to save my back. Great explanation, enjoyed the video!

[willagrant]

This is so cool, I had to stop due to an injury. Next year, topbar!

[janethale]

Hi Ralph! First year top bar beekeeper and basic idiot about all of this. We installed our bees last Saturday & checked them yesterday (Wednesday). They were making great progress but I made lots of mistakes and lost comb. LOVE THIS VIDEO and need to know how to make some rescue bars. I couldn’t tell how to do that. I tossed the comb that fell bc I had nowhere to reattach it.

[tonyoliver]

I’m learning all about bee keeping so I can start doing it next year… I think it may be too late this year. Very informative you’ve got a new sub (almost at 250! Think im 229 😛)

[BisonArmstrong]

Wow, learned so much from this. Thanks for sharing.

[paulbeadle]

High Ralph hope you are well mate your filming is better than when I last commented 👍 😉 😀