Initial Rough Setup & Location
If you’ve been following our series on Beekeeping you know that we now have two fully assembled barrel top bar bee hives. We even had them nicely positioned on some left-over pavers from our patio project. As you can see they look pretty good and could be fully functional at this point. But Martha and I couldn’t leave well-enough alone!
Staining Bee Hives
The first addition we wanted to do was add a little finish and protection to the wood components so we used left-over deck stain that we had laying around and stained the wood. We hope this will extend the life of our hives as well as give them a more “finished” look! We have been very pleased with the result and would recommend others stain their wood right after cutting it prior to assembling the hive. Staining ahead of assembly makes it much easier and avoids having to worry about getting stain on the barrel part of the hive.
Assembling Hive Divider
Another add-on was suggested by a friend from our local beekeeping club after he visited and took a look at our setup. The first recommendation which was shared by several others we talked to at our first visit to the beekeeping club was to add a divider within each hive to help keep the bees to one side of the hive. The divider could then be moved and more top bars placed as the bee colony became more established. Hopefully the divider would help ensure brood comb is kept near the entrance and honey comb kept to the other side.
In order to give the bees a more secure and enclosed shelter it was suggested that we cut sections of plywood as a direct cover to the top bars. The sectioning off of the top bars would also enable us to only remove a section at a time to keep all the bees from other sections from flying out at once. I highly recommend this idea s it has since proven very useful since the bees always seem to find a way through the imperfections spaces between the top bars.
Top Bar Section Covers
The last suggestion was to make the entrance to the hive smaller. When the colony is new it does not have a strong ability to defend its hive so having a large opening, like the one present in these barrels, could make it difficult for the hive to fend off intruders. Another reason for a reduced entrance to give the bees something unique that they can associate with their hive.
Entrance Reducer & Unique Pattern
Since we plan on getting package bees they will not be familiar with their hives and could easily be confused when leaving the hive and return to the wrong hive. We built bird house like openings for our hives and added some unique patterns around each hive entrance to address these concerns. The entrance reduction setup allows us to easily remove the face plate and replace it with one with a larger or smaller opening, or none at all as needed.
This pretty much covers all the add-ons we made to the hives… Except one major change that came to us one morning while browsing a seed catalog that had a listing of chicken tractors.
Check back later to read about our major change to the traditional barrel top bar bee hive design!
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