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question on honey production vs langstroth

18K views 37 replies 17 participants last post by  shannonswyatt 
#1 ·
a lot of people seem to be saying langstroth makes substantially more honey than top bars, but are there any studies that show one way or another?
 
#36 ·
I don't know about your bees, but putting frames that are not glued and nailed into my brother's hives is asking from trouble. The amount of propolis those girls put on things is astonishing, and un-nailed frames won't live long.

The nails do more than hold the wood together to let the glue set, they provide significant shear strength, much more than the wood. A nail through the side bar into the top bar is the difference between a splintered off top bar and a whole frame when the bees have made a mess, as they will sooner or later.

Make a simple assembly jig, and you can put together 20 frames in half an hour or so, all nearly perfect.

Always always CHECK the frames for square and flat, and correct them before the glue sets.....

It doesn't take an huge amount of time to make frame parts once you get set up properly to do so and if you manufacture a large number of parts per operation. May not save any money if you consider time, but scrap materials work just fine. Lots of 24" 2x4, 2x6, and 2x8 pine at construction sites, lots of cut-offs at lumber yards (so a box costs 29 cents times four plus the effort of cutting down and rabbeting or cutting box joints).

For a commercial operation, hard to justify making boxes and frames unless you have lots of time on your hands in the winter, but for a hobbyist with a table saw, not a significant investment in time.

Peter
 
#37 ·
I'm somewhat ignorant about top bar hives as the people I speak to about them seem less interested in honey production but in bee husbandry for the most part. I'm making the assumption the frames of surplus honey are stored to the outside of the brood nest as frames (top bar beekeepers are not adding top bar honey supers above?) as the flow crowds out brood. Then you have combs full of honey with no side or bottom support which you have to pull, transfer into another box and transport to an extracting location. Just that aspect of pulling and transferring frames in a yard seems time consuming and what keeps them from collapsing under the weight of say 5 or 6 lbs lbs of honey? Am I understanding these top bar frames are then being put in a radial extractor and spun to extract? I can't imagine the onces I have seen full of honey would last through the 1st minute on the lowest setting on my 20/40 Maxant. Am I also understanding people here are extracting them in radial (or tangetial) extractors successfully? Are these hives all started with packages, are you top bar guys using swarms or is there some method of transferring a nuc into them that does not entail major manipulations? We get calls about nucs for top bar hives and I also wonder if anyone is out there making top bar nucs because I'd love to have somewhere to refer people.
 
#38 ·
Joel, a top bar generally isn't supered, but there are folks that do super them. Really, if you want to use supers it makes sense to stick with Langs. Most folks running TBH's are not running a lot of them, so harvesting them is normally done a bar at a time on a hive. Most folks take the bars, cut of the comb and put the bar back in the hive, of put it someplace to let the bees clean it up and then put the bar back in the hive. Production on the TBH's isn't like a Lang, and extraction usually isn't something you would do with top bars. I have read the some folks do use extractors, but you are right, you would have to be careful to not totally destroy the comb. Mostly you would get comb honey or crush and strain. Again, if you want production stick with Langs.

I would guess that most hives are started via packages, followed by swarms. Some people do a chop and crop from a Lang hive, but this isn't for the faint of heart. Even people that have done it successfully don't recommend it. Once you have a hive or two you can do splits. I personally have put together TBH swarm traps, and I hope to get some caught this spring. But I'm hedging my bets and do have some Robo style (lang) swarm traps as well.

Not too many folks sell top bar nucs. I believe that Sam Comfort at Anarchy Apiaries used to, but I saw a video not that long ago of him making packages. The impression I got was that he would rather sell packages than nucs. The problem with TBH's and nucs is there is no standard which makes it difficult for someone to sell nucs. Some are considerably shallower than others, some are much wider.

There are a few selling nucs, but I haven't been keeping up with the folks that are selling them.

I think there are a lot of folks that start with TBHs, but eventually go to Langs if they want production. There are some folks like Wyatt Mangum that use TBH's for commercial pollination, but he is in the hundreds of hives, not thousands like the bigger guys. They require more maintenance when the hive is being established, otherwise you can end up with a cross combed mess.
 
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