New TBH from medium brood chamber...again?

[RBar]

Hey,
As mentioned in earlier posts, I may afterall try a TBH again this year now that I think I understand their culture better...
Question: (Michael B.?) rather than waiting on a swarm that may never come, could I simply take a Medium Brood chamber w/queen and place it over the front top bars, with some temporary bars notched for access below and out and to the exterior of the hive? Essentially forcing them to travel through the TBH...
Would they start comb below, maybe expect the queen to move down into the TBH, or later, physically move her there?
It WOULD be nice to let the bees do most of the work, they are going to anyway.
I thought of adapting conventional boxes to the TBH comb shape, and just transfer over...marginal success at best with that for me. So, I am considering ways to build in place this year...
I would be interested in hearing of other than new-swarm installations that were successful, with as little alteration of existing brood comb as possible.

RBAR

[Penultimate]

If you design your hive to be 19" across, you can make the the top-bars interchangeable with your Langstroth hives. This can come in handy in many ways. For your problem of introducing an existing hive to the TBH, you could put a few top-bars in your Langstroth hive and let them draw down comb. They should do this fairly quickly if you time it in the spring. Stick a few in the brood area and then you have some starter brood.

From there - you have various options - but mostly this will enable you to run a split from your Lanstroth into your TBH.

[MIKI]

I made arms inside of one of my TBH hives one year and just hung the whole box of frames inside the TBH (Ihad built a wider one for this attempt) I hung them in the rear hoping the bees would reestablish the brood nest near the entrance. I ended up with a colony at the rear and they totally combed in the frames and never moved off them. The following spring I had to cut the whole thing up and shake it into a TBH anyway. Bees will not abandon brood unless you put the frames inside the TBH upside down! Mixing equipment is never a good idea unless you intend to keep it that way in which case you loose the advantages of running a TBH in the first place.

[MIKI]

I found some pics of the hive I am talking about in the above post.

http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y291/mikisbees/ConversionHiveComb2.jpg

http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y291/mikisbees/ConversionHiveComb1.jpg

You can see the ends of the support arms for the frames.

[Michael Bush]

They pretty much want to keep the brood nest they have. They will EXPAND it but they really don't move it other than if they expand it it may contract more into the area they expanded into. In other words if you want them in the TBH, you'll have to put the brood there or take it from them. If you have other hives, I'd give the brood to another hive and shake them into the top bar hive.