pollen trap

[rosmic]

hi there, i'm brand new to beekeeping. i plan to make my top bar hive this weekend and would like to avoid buying packaged bees. anyone out there who lives nearby and needs to make a split?
my dad lives in Newark Ca he has been making splits. i am interested in making a tbar hive also. do you know if it is possible to make a pollen trap for the tbar hive. this morning was the first time i posted a question on this site. im not sure if it came through but my site name is under rosmic

[Tomas]

Howdy Rosmic,

I’ve used pollen traps in the past with my Kenyan top bar hives, which are trapezoidal in shape. The easiest way to mount them was by giving the hive an end entrance with a bit of a landing board—on which the pollen trap could rest. Although the side entrance on the hive has its advantages, the way it slants makes mounting the pollen trap there impractical or more difficult to build one that could be mounted there.

http://i155.photobucket.com/albums/s313/Tomas_fotos/LandingboardonKtbh.jpg

I suppose you could use an exterior mounted trap designed for a normal Langstroth hive. You only need to seal off part of the back of the trap that would overhang the end of the ktbh box, forcing the bees to enter through the screen in the front.

In this case I was making my own pollen traps anyways so I decided to change the dimensions so it would fit my ktbh boxes without a problem. One of the modifications I made was to make the entrance screen a bit higher than what I normally see on pollen traps. This way the bees would have more area through which they could enter. I didn’t want to create too much congestion there. There is also a double entrance screen to help dislodge a higher percentage of pollen.

http://i155.photobucket.com/albums/s313/Tomas_fotos/Ktbhpollentrap.jpg

If I were to make some more, I would probably make the drawer a bit deeper (although this one was worked without problems). Other than that they worked just fine. Or maybe I should say as well as the hardware cloth I get down here in Honduras. The spaces aren’t always consistent, unfortunately, so bees can get through some holes without losing their pollen.

http://i155.photobucket.com/albums/s313/Tomas_fotos/Ktbhpollentrapentrancescreenanddraw.jpg

I sealed off the underneath part of the trap—just to keep the bees from crawling into the collection drawer. I used pieces of the aluminum sheets that are used at a printing plant.

http://i155.photobucket.com/albums/s313/Tomas_fotos/Backviewofpollentrap.jpg

To keep it against the hive, I just put two small nails through the back roof part of the pollen trap and into the hive box. The entrance screen can be removed with out taking off the whole trap, for those days that you do not want to collect pollen.

If you have a Tanzanian top bar hive (rectangular shape), it would be even easier to use a regular exterior mounted pollen trap that is made for Langstroth hives. Again, it usually needs to have a bit of a landing board on which the pollen trap rests. And then if the hive is made to hold frames, the entrance may be longer than the trap itself, but it might be easy to seal off that extra entrance space to ensure the bees only enter and exit through the trap.

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Tom

[Wojtek]

The text is in a foreign language but the picture will give you some different idea of pollen trap. Go half of this page down and you will see something yellow.
http://www.homepage.interaccess.com/~netpol/POLISH/Ule/CzescII.html