Day 39: First TopBar Hive

The new bees all clustered around the entrance to their new home.

The days run hot and heavy together and I find myself in the hives more than once a week. This trend will slow now that I have taken delivery of my last bees for the year. Today's bees came from Wicked Bee Apiary and the nuc was built in a TopBar box so the bees had to build everything themselves on foundationless frames. I waited a long time for these bees and my wait was well-rewarded.

The other nucs I got had four frames of bees. John has been holding this one for me longer than he planned because of the weather, and as a result it had seven frames of brood and stores in it. It had eight originally, but one of the combs fell off its bar into the bottom of the nuc. One of the combs was pretty small (I should have taken a picture of it), and when John went to add it to the hive he discovered that the bar was warped so it wouldn't go into the hive without creating a small gap in a couple of places. Apparently that won't do so he told me to take the comb to the house, cut out the finished honey (there was also a lot of nectar, but it wasn't ready so it wasn't capped).

As we finished up and I looked at the comb I saw 12 larvae in the cells and three capped brood. That's fifteen bees! John said to just get over it and process the comb, but I couldn't. I tried. I took it into the house and cut it off the bar, but then I thought, "Why not reattach it but to a straight bar? Maybe even a bar in the hybrid hive so the bees there will be encouraged to move into the TopBar portion of that hive instead of packing nectar into cells in the middle of the brood.

It took a bit of work with a candle and the gas stove, but I managed to attach the bit of comb to a bar from the hybrid, and I put it back into that hive. In the process I discovered a small colony of sugar ants had made their home in the TopBar side of the hive. I encouraged them to move out. I removed the queen excluder from between the two portions of the hive, and as I was finishing up I saw workers already swarming over the little comb. I look forward to checking on them Sunday.

Things I learned today: 1) When you find a new small comb on the end of the row in a TopBar hive, move it in one space between two already drawn out combs to help the bees stay straight and not go 3-dimensional in their comb-building. 2) When you need to move frames around in the hive, make sure to keep all the brood together--don't put a honey and pollen frame between two brood frames. 3) When you go to put the bars back in a TopBar hive, overlap them a little so there is no space between them and then set them down slowly, tight together. Don't try to slide them together.

And that's the bee report.