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Ever encountered hostility from other beekeepers over your TBH?

45K views 152 replies 58 participants last post by  shannonswyatt 
#1 ·
Do other beekeepers ever criticize or mock you for having a TBH? Just curious how common this experience is.
 
#145 ·
Heck I wouldn't caste them aside too quickly, I'm not familiar with your area but generally there are not a lot of Top Bar groups.

The guy cannot be too bigoted or he would not have got a TBH in the first place. However sounds like he is not your guy but just look for someone who knows bees.

First TBH's I was involved with, I never read any books on them but I do know bees, I was able to get excellent results by top bar standards and help others do the same. It's more about knowing bees rather than all the drivel that gets talked about why this or that hive design is better.

Figure out who in the group is successful with their bees, and out of them find one who is not too prejudiced to help you and is willing to. For me I didn't find working with TBH's hard at all.
 
#146 ·
I made one TBH along with a lang just to see what they are like. To put it simple I prefer the lang. But that is me. I see where the next guy woudl favor the TBH. That is all well and good. but the limitations and disadvantages of both are real. As long as the TBH hive holds up I have decided to use it to harvest cut comb honey. Easy to get into , No heavy lifting. Super easy to find the queen and inspect the brood nest and I find it far less necessary to do so. Harder to get put back together when the bees are all over the place but inspections still take far less time. I think it makes a great learning tool but is not as adaptable as the lang as the colony progresses.

The lang has a huge disadvantage particularly to the beginner in the fact it is adaptable. proper management of that adaptability is not always easy you can make it bigger you can make it smaller. but knowing just when to which is not always easy. Plus it's components come in a wide variety. everything from varied sizes of boxes to specialized bottom boards. feeders. covers. excluders. includers. and you name it. I am waiting for the revolving door entrance to be made. All of this not only leads to confusion in equipment selection but an abundance of excess and sometimes unnecessary equipment. Lang present a storage issue that TBH's do not have. you put the equipment back in the hive with a TBH. when all those huge boxes of honey come off a lang. you have to have a place to keep them until next year.

To ,me all beekeeping equipment has that feel that it was derived from the trash laying around when the person tried to design it. just because they are production made now does not change the fact they where basically barely make due designs. The TBH directly falls into that category. the very reason it was made was for people that have nothing to make hives from. The design of the lang was determined more by the dimensions of tossed out apple crates than the needs of the bees or the beekeeper. I have never seen any serious consideration of the impact that the completely unnatural expansion and contraction of the hive has on bees. I suspect ti cannot be good. I do see alto of comments on how good it is not on the backs of beekeepers to lift a deep of honey. Yet they still make them that big. TI is fairly common knowledge that bees will build the nest either near the entrance to the hive or at the tip of it. yet the lang hive will both. move the entrance around on the bees in some cases. and locate the nest at the bottom of the colony. I have read that bees will move up in winter and back down in the summer. I have not found this to be true. but that the bees work there way around the hive in a circle. A barrel woudl be more suitable to bees than a box. it is also tremendously inconvenient to have the brood nest under hundreds of lbs of honey. Yet a solution has never been found for that yet.

I have heard at times that queenless bees will produce more honey because they do not expend resources on rearing brood. yet not one honey production management method includes removing the bees from their queen. not even for a short period of time.

Where is the thought processes that lead to innovation? Buried under centuries of "This is how it has always been done"? They used to bleed people to remove the bad blood also. somewhere along the line they gave that up. I believe the lang hive should have been given up long ago also. That it is not is a testament that beekeeping is going nowhere fast. and has been doing so for a very long time. So do it any way you choose. but most of all try not to do it any way anyone else has ever tried. I don't think many of them are doing it very well anyway. They are doing it so bad that they make headlines regularly.
 
#147 ·
I have heard at times that queenless bees will produce more honey because they do not expend resources on rearing brood. yet not one honey production management method includes removing the bees from their queen. not even for a short period of time.
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Sounds like a recipe for drone layers.
 
#150 ·
Think about what you just said.

We take away the quieen so there wlll not be any brood for the workers to care for.... then we add brood back in.... hmmm... something does not make sense.... anyway... guess we can go through the hives everyday cutting out QCs.... :)
 
#153 ·
Good point. Eggs hatch into brood. Brood that is under two days old can be raised into a queen.

Like I said before, I never did the whole remove queen method of making more honey, I just read about it. I know a lot of folks would remove any queen cells that are developed if you put in young brood.
 
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