This year has been the first year I have sold bees and I used a wonderful site called Bid4Bees. I had created 2 Nuclei colonies especially for this purpose both of these colonies have prospered and hugely benefited from the oilseed rape crop (Canola) which has allowed the bees to make loads of comb and the new queen to lay lots of eggs therefore producing lots of bees so I think my customers did well.
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| spot the queen |
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| A polystyrene nuc box |
So I spent the proceeds of the sale on procuring a cedar top bar hive.
Top bar bee-keeping is becoming very popular at the moment and many people are choosing this type of hive as it considered more natural. Certainly the bees do build their colony as they would in the wild but it is not a system for producing lots of honey as it you can't easily extract using a centrifugal extractor so you need to press the honey out of the comb or use it as cut comb honey. This means that the bees lose the wax when you take the honey where as in hives set up for honey you spin the honey out of the frames and the frames can go back to the bees so the can refill (this can happen over a few years saving the bees a lot of work). I see the top bar as a solution for people who want to keep bees but don't want a lot of messing around with honey. So I have decided that I need to give it a try and I want to develop a way of producing a nucleus of bees for sale in the Top Bar format at a premium of course
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| A Top Bar hive |
