Top Bar Hive Harvest

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Top Bar Hive Harvest

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10/6
Today we worked the hives. The langstroths both had two supers left on. These were primarily filled with partially filled comb that we wanted the bees to complete. Results were disappointing. We were able to remove an entire super of empty comb, bringing one hive closer to shutting down for the season. When we harvested honey, two months ago, both hives had partial comb. Because it was so early in the summer and winter comes so late here, we figured we’d be good for at least one more super. We placed a super of partially completed comb on top and a super of empty, drawn comb between the top super and the brood chambers. The thinking was to get the bees to fill the empty super and complete the top super. On one hive we found very little progress on the partial combs and no nectar at all in the empty comb. The other hive had partial comb in both supers. No harvest from the langstroths today

The top-bar hives were another matter. The one with the fancy paint job is getting along, but not breaking any records. The new one, which we hived a swarm in, is going gangbusters. The last top bars had comb over six inches in thickness. This is great, a beautiful sight to behold, but not very practical from a management point of view. We have never worked with this sort of hive before, so this is all new territory. Where as the frames of a langstroth hive can be placed in an empty super and carried around, top bars are fragile and require more support than that. The best I could come up with is using spatulas and buckets to collect the comb. This is a messy business and results in getting honey everywhere. Bees don’t much care where they find honey and will rob and exposed honey. In short order there are bees on tools, gloves and everything else that has been touched with sticky gloves.

Picture below is a view of the top bar hive with a few bars removed, looking down into hive.
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As stated previously, the one with the fancy paint job was not thriving. Many of the combs in back were only partially completed. Open cells with nectar and green honey were visible. The swarm hive, though, has been busy this year. It was difficult to remove top bars because the comb was so thick. It kept shearing off on adjoining bars as it was lifted from the hive. After a number of bars were removed and harvested a little more care could be taken in sliding comb back before lifting out. Even so, there was quite a mess of honey in the bottom of the hive.

The picture below is a view of a top-bar with the comb hanging.
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Short of building a box to hold the top bar comb, it is difficult to handle without breaking. We may need to construct a box after seeing the behavior of the bees today. The best rig I could come up with was to stack two empty supers and put the fume board over it. It doesn’t seem to have worked too well. I returned after two hours and found the bees had pretty well ripped up the one intact comb I harvested and were filling the buckets that had been filled with broken comb. The fume board didn’t seem to bother them. Figuring the problem was there was too much ventilation, I left the intact top-bar comb to the bees – they were in a robbing frenzy by then – and moved the empty super boxes and buckets of honey comb to another location. Using a piece of cardboard to seal the bottom of the boxes, I placed the buckets inside and refreshed the fume board. A small opening was left for the bees to exit. I watched for a while – the foragers/robbers found the opening but didn’t have any desire to enter. Eventually the fumes began building up inside and I saw bees beginning to exit. This is not very efficient/effective. We’re going to have to research this and devise something a little more efficient for harvesting.

The picture below shows a six quart bucket receiving harvested comb.
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10/7
Rain today, and it feels like it. The comb pulled from the top bar intact was a total loss. I abandoned it to the bees and they had pretty well emptied it by this morning. I got out in the yard and picked up stuff to get ready for the rain.

The two buckets had an incredible number of bees in them, even after driving them off with the smoker and fume board. The buckets were placed in the freezer overnight and are now thawing. The honey will be strained to remove the bees, and then the comb will be crushed to release the rest of the honey.

10/13
Today we finished the harvest of the top-bar hive. A total of 14 bars were taken from the hive, including two or three a few days ago. We haven’t bottled any honey yet, so we will be able to get approximate figures. Not all the frames were completed – unripe honey and nectar were broken off the bottoms. Today was much better than my last attempt. Karen helped by operating the bucket, which we kept removed from all the activity around the hive. Much better results. Perhaps a total of 10 bees were caught in the bucket. I would bring clean comb to the bucket, karen would open the lid, I would deposit the comb inside and she would close the lid. She kept her gloves clean, which helped to keep from attracting the attention of robbing bees. The bucket holds about 8 gallons, adequate for today’s job. Since the comb isn’t strong enough to run through an extractor, or uniformly shaped for decapping, we process it by crushing the comb in a colander placed in the top of the bottling bucket. Honey and wax flakes drain from the colander to the mesh strainer below. It is a slow process. The relatively empty wax that remains in the colander is put into a glass pan and baked at 200 degrees to allow the honey to settle and the wax to float. When it cools, the wax sheet is removed from the pan, broken up and put in the wax melter – a pyrex measuring cup in a pan of water. Honey that separated from the wax in the glass pan is eventually bottled as “stout” and used for baking or other purposes – never sold as honey. In the melter impurities settle from the wax and wax is poured off into a cupcake pan to make cakes of bee’s wax for future use in candles and anything else wax may be useful for. We got a fair amount of wax from extraction and comb cutting – we should get quite a bit from harvesting comb this way. So far the best utensils I have found to work with this stuff are old steel barbeque tools – picked up at a thrift store for pennies on the dollar.
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10/15
Bottling totals so far are 4 gallons. We still have at least a half gallon of stout that needs to be bottled after the wax has been processed. The whole process is slow and not too efficient. I have had no luck finding a comb press on the internet and will have to construct one. The average seems to be a little over a quart per top-bar. We might have reached 2 quarts per top-bar if they were completely filled.

Regards,
Pat
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