Make Shift Top Bar Bee Hive

Here's an idea i had of making a simple Top Bar Beehive (TBH) for very little money.

Please note i am inexperienced with bees, and this is my first attempt at keeping and attracting them.
so any advice to my design is welcome....

Step 1: Materials

Comments

[Turnpike7a]

where did you find the boxes at? there are a few "new" designs that us the polystyrene as forms for hives, as they are better insulated and lighter in weight

[indigo88]

i got them from a local market, i used to sell alot of stuff via ebay so used it as packaging and thought of another idea for them...

[fullabull69]

CapnChkn knows what's going on; that would be really hard to work the frames, and take care of the bees. Also, you're gonna have ventilation issues. I would put some ventilation holes or screen of some sort in the sides, and this would be a GREAT idea for a swarm catching box. Digging the ingenuity; great job!

[CapnChkn]

Ouch.  Your idea is sound, bees will take up residence in just about anything that's the right size.  There's absolutely enough information on the Internets to answer any question you would want.  Apis Mellifera, the common honeybee, is the most studied insect in the world.

There are a number of flaws in your concept. The first I look at is "bee-space." Bees have a way of building in very specific sizes. Anything larger than 3/8" (9mm) they fill with comb. Anything smaller than 1/4" (6 mm) they fill with a sticky stuff they get from the ends of branches and flowers called Propolis. Everything inside of the hive body will be glued down with it.

The styrofoam isn't a bad idea, in fact many hives are built with it, and lined with wood. The bees will chew it up if they move in at all, because they really like to have a dark space with light coming from underneath. Usually the extruded, not the beaded, form of Styro is used.

Last the top bars aren't going to give you much to work with. I don't know what kind of hive you got from whomever. You could probably get more attention if you told us about that, and we could tell you if it was workable. Top bars should be between 1.25 and 1.5 inches (32 to 35 mm) wide.  The length on a standard Langstroth is 19 inches (481 mm), so these bars will be too short to fit in one of them.  The wider bars are for storing honey, the thinner ones are what the bees build brood/baby bees/the nest on.

The top bars in a regular TBH are ripped lumber so they can be pushed tightly together. This makes a kind of ceiling for the bees; the cover fitting loosely over them. What you have here is more like the traditional Warre hive, also a top bar type.

For anyone having questions about what a "top bar" is, in a usual Langstroth form of hive, the comb is built in frames. That is to say it has wood all around it. Top bar hives use only the top piece of wood, called the top bar. Some have a pair of side bars, but if there's a bottom bar, then it's no longer a TBH, but rather a frame hive.