Top bars are considered as the mondern hives because they simplify beekeeping actvities right from manual colonisation, insepction to havesting. They also yield much more honey compared to traditional hives.
Colonising topbars has been the most tricky activity in beekeeping, whereby bees do not easily colonise them by themselves though they are easy to colonise using colony split method (manually).
besides colonization, they also build combs across the bars! WBA members have learned and tried a lot of tricks and ideas to solve some drawbacks like this.
Recently, Esau one of the beekeepers of WBA used honey to bait bees to colonize his topbars hives (In fact these hives had stayed empty for the last 13months).
He soak a piece of heavy cotton cloth into honey which he hung in one of his 3 empty hives as a new idea to bait bees.
Note: He had tried baiting bees using wax starter strips and smoking propolis, baiting grass in the hives before but none attracted bees to colonize the hives!
Fortunately within 4 days, a swarm of bees had already occupied his hive!
He didn't stop, he did the same trick to 2 more empty hives and they also got colonized within almost the same dates!
He thereafter, shared the new trick to other members where 6 out of 17 members who tried the same trick on their hives have sucessfully got some of their empty hives (1-3hives) colonised in just a period of 1 month!
This is amazing and everyone is asking where do these bees come from to colonise the new empty topbar hives.
Of course log hives can not last long with getting colonized since bees are more familiar with them than more modified hive structures like topbar hives.
WBA members scheduled April 2014 as the next season for spliting colonises to get new colonises for empty hives.
Thanks for such an interesting simple trick!
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