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Bee Pests and Diseases

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Your Top Bar Hive

While top bar hives are by no means a new technology, they are a significant departure from the conventional square-box hive which has dominated the US beekeeping landscape since the Civil War. So there could be said to be two camps, if you will. One camp carries a belief in a long-standing tradition, and the other a desire to do something different because what we’ve been doing for the last 150 years doesn’t seem to be sustainable. This has led to a swirling morass of information marked by strong feelings and high passion. Emotions confuse the matter for the novice, who has no basis for comparison and often finds it difficult to understand why people are so adamant about their own personal choices in beekeeping. In this chapter I will do my best to explain top bar hives clearly so that you can compare and choose the beekeeping method that makes the most sense for you. Top bar hives have been made of all sorts of materials and containers—from baskets and flowerpots to recycled scra

It’s All About the Wax

Honeycomb Honeycomb or comb—with its signature hexagons — is the beeswax structure that makes up the heart and skeleton of a honeybee colony. The hexagon shape itself is a marvel of natural engineering—it is the most efficient shape available. The six matching and touching sides of each cell use the least amount of material to create, while at the same time producing a very strong structure—and the hexagons fit together perfectly, leaving no wasted space between. Comb is created by the bees and made from beeswax. Tiny white ovals of beeswax are secreted from the wax glands in a young honeybee’s abdomen and shaped by the bees into sheets or panels of interconnected hexagons. All of the natural processes of the hive—everything that bees do—happens in or on their comb. Bees raise their young (known as brood) in brood comb cells; they store their food in honeycomb cells, and they arrange the combs inside their hive according to the needs of the colony. Comb is intrinsic to the honeybe

Treasures of the Hive

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