Top Bar Hive Summer Tips

A quick visual guide to managing your hive during the summer.
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Captions:
Bars are added in a top bar hive in order to give the bees more area in which to build comb.

If they have too few bars to build upon, they may start swarming or abscond.

A good time to add more bars is when the bees have 3-4 still empty in front of them.

Adding several more encourages them to keep building and lets the bees know they still have enough room to expand their colony.

When adding bars to a top bar hive that's still building population in spring and summer, be sure to add a few bars at the end of the brood chamber and before the bars of honey.

This allows the queen to keep laying eggs and the colony to maximize its worker population and build up enough honey to make it through winter.

If bars are not added between the brood chamber and honey stores, the colony will become honey bound and will perceive that they are out of room to keep expanding the colony.
When the hive is nearly full it's time to harvest honey to give the colony more space.

Top bars are harvested bar by bar.

When harvesting honey, especially in the first year, it's important to first know how much your honey your bees will need through winter.
Honey harvested from a full top bar hive can be stored and fed back to the bees in winter.

Ask local beekeepers how much honey is needed to overwinter a colony in your area.

Because successful, healthy overwintering is the chief goal in beekeeping, we recommend taking no honey from first-year colonies.

Music by Baxter Roy Long (https://baxterroylong.com)
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