This was my father's top bar hive. I don't know how long it had been since it had been opened. The back end of the hive, wood was rotten and open. As we pried the top bars off (with roaches scurrying everywhere) we quickly found that the comb was not aligned across with the bars. So we ended up cutting the comb off at the top, and this is what we came up with.
In the bottom left was a rodent nest.
We treated it as a cutout and transferred the comb to a new topbar hive, cutting the comb into pieces, so it would fit.
Despite all the chaos, it was actually a pretty strong hive.

In the bottom left was a rodent nest.
We treated it as a cutout and transferred the comb to a new topbar hive, cutting the comb into pieces, so it would fit.
Despite all the chaos, it was actually a pretty strong hive.