Bees for Development Journal 138 April 2021
PRACTICAL BEEKEEPING
A simple way to make beeswax starter strips for top-bars Janet Lowore, Programme Manager, Bees for Development Top-bar bee hives are designed to be bee hives in which the beekeeper can lift the bees’ combs from the hive and replace them, i.e. they are moveable-comb hives. It is ideal if the combs within a top-bar hive can be handled individually, without causing them to break. However, as anyone who has used top-bar hives knows, this is not always the case. Sometimes bees build their combs in a curve or in a wavy pattern and once they start doing that – it is hard to correct. There are several tips and tricks which beekeepers can employ to
encourage bees to build straight combs, with one comb on one bar. Making sure the width of the bar is correct is essential: this means 35mm wide for European Apis mellifera honey bees, and 32mm wide for African Apis mellifera honey bees. It is also useful to provide the bees with a guide down the middle of each bar: this can be a ridge, a groove, a point, or a starter strip of beeswax. In this article we demonstrate how to make a simple starter strip of beeswax on a top-bar, even if the bar itself has no guiding features.
1
2
After soaking remove the guide bar from the water and align it, length-ways along a top-bar making a right angle all the way along. Hold the two pieces together very firmly with a slight tilt downwards and then rotate so that the guide piece is somewhere between vertical and horizontal.
Take a piece of wood, such as a spare top-bar, and soak it in a bucket of water. This is your guide bar.
3
4
Take a pan of molten beeswax and carefully pour beeswax on to the wet guide piece and into the groove created where the two pieces meet.
Continue pouring until you have created a thin layer of beeswax all the way along the guide piece but touching the top-bar. 3
