I’ve had this crazy idea to keep bees for awhile now. I finally decided to get something going after hearing about all the bee loses by commercial beekeepers during 2006 as was announced on 60 Minutes in 2007. After doing further research, it appears there are also very few “feral” colonies of bees in nature because of the parasitic mite Varroa destructor. I found all of this very disturbing and decided to do something about it. So my quest began to set up some beehives.
This first order of business was to do some research. I checked out a few books from the library and really liked The Backyard Beekeeper by Kim Flottum. I got a lot of info out of this book and so ensued the scouting of locations for my bees. I decided my urban property is just to small so I got the brilliant idea to see if the university I work for would be interested. It seemed perfect: the university has lots of forested property and lakes, the bees would be close to me for inspections, there is enormous educational value in a beehive, and we would be doing a service to the local bee populations by increasing the genetic diversity. I had also hoped the biology dept would be willing to financially support a portion of this project in exchange for allowing students access. After a few emails, I finally got approval in early January. After even more emails, it became clear that the university was not interested in funding any of the project. So be it. At least I had an ideal location for my bees. During this downtime waiting for approval in the fall of 2007, I was receiving all the bee suppliers catalogs and pricing equipment. I decided I was going the Flottum way of using 8-Frame equipment. By my estimates, each hive was going to be around $200 and I wanted to start with two. This doesn’t even include the cost of bees or other equipment. With out the support of the university, I was going to have to come up with a different solution as this was just to pricey for me alone.
About this time I also discovered BeeSource.com. This is a large community of beekeepers that share lots of great information. One of it’s members, Michael Bush also had a great website about doing less management of bees and going back to a more organic way of beekeeping. One of these methods uses the Top Bar Hive (TBH). By my understanding, this is a very traditional hive design popular in Africa. Its advantages include low cost, mainly because you don’t have to purchase frames or beeswax foundation, and theoretically improved mite resistance with the use of “natural” honeycomb that the bees make and size themselves. Traditionally, beekeepers use wax foundation sized to 5.4 mm. This is not the size cells bees would normally build if they didn’t have foundation. The larger cell size does make bigger bees, however, there are reports that bees using small cell foundation (4.9 mm) or their own natural comb have fewer problems with mites. So, I decided to design and build my own TBHs. My next entry will show the design and construction of these hives.
