We talk a lot about top bar hives over here at Bee Built, and for good reason!

The top bar hive is one of the oldest and most commonly used hive styles in the world. Historians have discovered early designs of top bar hives dating back to ancient Greece which consisted of sticks laid across the top of baskets or pots. Today’s modern top bar hives similarly feature individual bars laid across the hive cavity, allowing bees to naturally build comb without 4-sided frames.

Bees benefit from top bar hives because of their organic nature: the foundation-less horizontal top bars permit the bees to build their own natural comb just as they would in the wild.

Beekeepers also benefit: they don’t have to lift heavy boxes, use chemical-laden foundations, or overly agitate the bees during colony management. Top bar hives can also reduce beekeeping costs as they do not require honey supers, extra frames, foundation, queen excluders, uncapping knives, extractors or other expensive tools.

When you get your bees you should  install them at one end of the hive with the follower boards spaced so that 8-12 bars are accessible to the colony.

Upon installing bees in the spring, most beekeepers feed their colony a syrup made of sugar water to promote building comb for their new home. To learn more about spring feeding, click  here.

Allow bees to access only one entrance and leave the rest closed. Over the first few weeks, the colony will rapidly build comb from the bars and soon this comb will be filled with honey, nectar, and pollen. The queen will be producing her next generation of bees.

As you check your hive, make sure that the comb is straight. If it is crooked or “cross-combed,” you must gently push it back into place on the bar. Failure to catch cross-comb early on will make it almost impossible for you to remove single bars of comb.

Bees are remarkably intelligent creatures--they’ve been minding their own beeswax for millennia. What does this mean for beekeepers? It means that caring for bees requires “less work than a dog, more than a goldfish.”

What sets top bar hives apart from Langstroth or Warre hives--and determines how much work they require--is that the hive space cannot be expanded through the stacking of additional boxes. Instead, beekeepers must frequently monitor the bars on which bees build comb by making sure the hive doesn’t overcrowd, adding new bars to create space, and harvesting honey when necessary.

As your colony grows, move the divider board down the hive cavity and add empty bars. After your final honey harvest, you should shrink the size of the hive cavity so there is less space for your bees to heat during the winter months. In a top bar hive, bees tend to attach their comb to the walls of the inner hive cavity. This requires an extra step: detaching comb from the hive before pulling bars out.

While managing a hive bar-by-bar takes slightly more time and attention than other hive styles, beekeepers often prefer them because the bees are more docile. The individual bars allow beekeepers to easily inspect specific parts of the hive and control the amount of exposure to light and air.