Wyatt Mangum on Top Bar Beekeeping

Wyatt Mangum is a professor at the University of Mary Washington in Virginia. He also has written a monthly column for American Bee Journal for years and years without ever missing a month on honey bee biology. He kept bees as a boy and then started over in 1986. He keeps all of his bees in top bar hives. His book on top bar beekeeping is in the final stages. I want to buy it the minute it is available.  He spoke at EAS in Boone at the beginning of this month.



He likes top bar hives and builds them now according to his own standard although there is no industry standard. Here are a few of his hives below. The photo below shows one that he built by weaving sticks together with telephone wire to form the sloping sides of the hive!


Because he does keep to his own standard, then he can easily transfer combs from one hive to another since the slope angle is the same on every box. He uses his own template.

He starts with a 1 X 12. The dimensions for the end boards are 12" sides, 17.5" top and 9.25" bottom. The sides are 1 X 12. He uses untreated wood and he keeps his entrance holes standard as well. He drills six holes at the end of the hive with a hand drill. Because he moves these hives, he has a hand grip on each hive which is simply a top bar turned sideways and nailed to the end. The floor is a 10" board (which we know is actually about a 9.75" board). He puts a cleat at the front of the hive to fill in the space between the first top bar and the end of the hive.. He paints his hives with paint rollers rather than brushes.

His top bars are 1 3/8" wide. He cuts starter strips for his top bars that are the same width (1 3/8"). He waxes these in with a dipper of melted wax - he made the dipper by cutting down a plastic cup and melting it slightly to form a pouring spout. He attached a dowel for a handle.

Note: This man is very handy and inventive. He makes all of his own equipment in a small tool shed. He showed us the stacks and stacks of wooden end boards and sides as he worked on putting together some 200 hives over the winter.

His slides are his own and although I took pictures of many of them for my own learning, I am only going to share the one below. The top bars are upturned so that you can see the starter strip. This is a 3 foot hive with 22 top bars. Since beekeepers have been known to lose fingers ripping top bars, I asked him how he got them cut and he gets a sheltered workshop to do them for him.



Very, very generously after his talk at EAS, he stayed in the hall and spoke to a number of us for about another hour afterwards.



He uses roofing tin as his roof. He says that if you don't have a good enough roof the combs drop off of the top bars (which explains why my top bar hive has comb lying on the SBB at the bottom.) He also said that bees won't stay in a top bar hive unless you have some old comb that is drawn to help the bees want to stay in the box (which is what finally worked in mine).

He nails the roofing tin to 2X4s to allow ventilation in the hive.  I used that corrugated white plastic but it wasn't enough insulation to protect the hive from the intense Atlanta heat this summer.  I went to our big box stores in Atlanta and they don't carry roofing tin.  Maybe I can buy some in the mountains at the hardware store there.

The notch you can see on the edge of the roof is for anchoring the rope he uses to tie down the top.
He cuts the tin section so that it can have an overlap the length of his hand.  He demonstrated how he measures it with his hand when he puts the top back on the hive.

Then he begins the tying down process.  He uses the notch cut in each end of the tin roof to anchor the tie.

He is very efficient so he quickly throws the rope to the opposite side.  He has this down to a fine science.

He has a screw eye on the end of the hive through which to tie the top down.

The hive is now secured until the next time.  (Don't you love his hat and jumpsuit - he said nobody recognized him on his wedding day because he didn't have it on!)

He plugs his entrances with pieces of sponge rather than trying to find a cork that will fit - like I said he is quite inventive.

I learned so much from Wyatt Mangum at EAS.  He was the highlight of the conference for me.

As I was chatting with him, up came my buddy from the Southeastern Organic Beekeepers Conference where we both were presenters:  Sam Comfort - my other top bar hero.

Rubbing Elbows with Well-Known Beekeepers

One advantage of going to EAS is the opportunity to rub elbows with well-known beekeepers. I learned from each of these men pictured below during my week at EAS.

Billy Davis is from Virginia and is a well-established beekeeper. I went to a talk he gave on making nucs. I learned so much from him about beekeeping in general in addition to what he shared about making nucs.

 For example, he uses hive drapes when he inspects the beehives and this cuts down on robbing. He said it was foolish for a beekeeper to lean a frame against a hive, uncovered. It's an invitation to robbers.  I came home inspired to use a hive drape going forward.  I have some old quilts that aren't good quilts but are sort of ragged.  I may cut sections from these quilts and make dowel casings so that they can become manipulation cloths for inspections.



Learning about the bees through managing nucs helps you manage colonies. He advocates using powdered sugar every other week in the middle of the day when the foragers are away from the hive.

And he had fun at the Brushy Mountain BBQ (see below!)


The next well-known beekeeper I was privileged to hear was Clarence Collison. When I was studying for the Young Harris Master Beekeeper exam, I studied every page of his book, What Do You Know? He has written a column in Bee Culture for years titled "What do you know?" and challenges beekeepers to stretch their knowledge about every aspect of beekeeping.

His talk was on pheromones. Most of what he talked about was material I had already studied in his book for the exam I took in May. One interesting thing he said that I didn't know was that if you removed the mandibular glands in the queen, she still would produce queen substance from the tergite gland on her abdomen.



He had fun at the BBQ as well and I took the opportunity to thank him for all I learned from his book to prepare for the exam.

In this picture on the right in navy blue is Dennis van Englesdorp.  Dennis is one of the foremost researchers in what's happening to bees today.  In his talk he said that if you had a hive with a "queen event" during a 50 day period,  then that hive had a 2.71 higher chance of dying than a hive that didn't have a "queen event" in the same 50 days.  A "queen event" means the hive was queenless, made an emergency queen, lost their queen or was requeened, for example, during that period of time.

My friend Phillip, standing with Dennis, and I asked Dennis to explain more about that to clarify it for us.  Dennis was accessible and friendly and gladly talked to us about our concerns.  I had misunderstood what he said and thought he meant that if a hive had a queen event, it was more likely to die.

He did say that, but that was in comparison to another hive that didn't have a queen event during the same time period.  The way I heard what he said, I thought every hive was highly likely to die since most hives have some sort of queen event during bee season.  But the issue is if that queen event hive is compared to one that doesn't have a queen event.  Make sense?

So I feel very lucky to have rubbed elbows with these particular three beekeepers during the week of EAS.  I also met Wyatt Mangum, writer for ABJ and keeper of top bar hives, but I have so much to write about what I learned from him that I am saving it for another post!

Dinner at Brushy Mountain Bee

At EAS on Wednesday night, Brushy Mountain Bee company hosted us all for dinner.  First I took a picture of the real store.  After ordering from them for years, it was nice to see the facility.

There was live music from a band playing hillbilly, country and Texas Swing.

We had a pulled pork BBQ where you actually pulled the pork off of the cooked pig yourself!\

I couldn't believe the apple in it's mouth.

And when we left, it was relieving to see that in this heat even at Brushy Mountain, their hives are bearding.  OK, small beards but there are beards nonetheless.

Thank you Brushy Mountain for a really lovely evening.

Blue Heron Inspection August 1, 2010

Before I left Atlanta, we ran a Metro Atlanta hive inspection at the Blue Heron preserve.  The goal was to do a powdered sugar shake on the hives there and to see how they were doing since we are having such a bad year as far as nectar is concerned.

We opened my hive and all was well and did a powdered sugar shake.  I almost forgot to do it, but one of the participants reminded me!  Then we opened Julia's hives.   Both were doing well.

Kevin and Peter who own the fourth hive were on the inspection so they opened their hive for the group as well.  Their third box on this hive was a medium that they had fitted with mostly shallow frames.  This meant that the bees were building comb between the bottom of the shallow frame and the top of the frames in the next box.  If left like that, the two boxes were likely to get stuck together in a real mess.  So while they had the hive open, we helped them transfer the shallow frames to a shallow box.  They took the two medium frames that were also in the box home to harvest the honey.

Click on the slide show below to see what we did.  We did not use powdered sugar on Kevin and Peter's hive because they don't have a screened bottom board.

For captions and/or to see the slideshow larger, click on the photo and everything will enlarge and you can read the captions.

Top Bar Hive is HUNGRY!

Before I left Atlanta to come to Boone for EAS, I went over to Valerie's to check on the top bar hive.  Today at EAS I am going to a workshop about how to build a top bar from scraps and weeds.  Hmmmm.

Here's the entry corner of the hive.  They are enthusiastically coming in and out.  Kudzu drapes over the fence above the hive and it is about to come into bloom.  That will give the bees some nectar.  In the meantime, they are hungry bees.



I brought another jar of the too-thin honey to feed to them.  They had completely drained the quart jar I left for them last week.  I transferred the Boardman top to the new jar.


I have the Boardman sitting on two shims inside the hive on the screened bottom.  I set it in there again, much to the bees' delight.



I stuck my camera inside the hive and took a picture.  Here is the parade of top bar comb.  You can see that they don't like the cotton string that I used to tie in some fallen comb.  There is also comb on the screened bottom - people tell me that comb sometimes falls off of the top bars onto the floor of the hive.  I hate that the bees put that much effort into wax building only to lose the comb like that.



Here the honey sits with the bees coming to feed.

I have just about enough of that thin honey to provide them with one more quart jar.  I hope that the Kudzu will  be in bloom when I get home so that I won't have to worry about them so much.

Wax Block Attempt for EAS

When I can go to a bee meeting and not enter something in the honey contest, I will think I am a mentally healthier person!  I decided to enter a wax block because I had a little wax from the harvest of the too-thin honey that Gina and I did for the movie.  I also had some wax from last year.

Six pours later every block I poured cooled with a crack in the center.  I was so frustrated.  A crack in a cooled wax block means that there was uneven cooling.  I was cooling all six of these blocks in my upper over which is a convection over.  You can see the fan at the back in the picture below.  I have always cooled my blocks in the top oven, but this time it wasn't working.  I decided it must be because air is let in through the fan and makes the temperature uneven.


Below you can see the wax melted in my Presto converted pot.


I"ve learned to heat the large measuring cup into which I filter the melted wax so that the wax doesn't cool on the bottom too fast.  So I set the cup in a pot to heat it before filtering the melted wax into it.


I was leaving for EAS on Monday afternoon.  So on Sunday night in utter frustration, I poured one last pour into a metal brownie pan and put it to cool in the bottom oven.  I pulled it out on Monday as I was packing the car.  It was not cracked!  Hooray!  But it wasn't perfect.  There were a few flecks in the wax because I had not used a brand new piece of silk to filter it.

You can see that it cooled well in this lower oven.  Not only did it not crack, but also it pulled away from the sides nicely.  

If it were not a last minute pour, I would have done it again.  There were flecks in the wax from not using a new piece of silk for a filter, it was darkened from now being poured 7 times (reheating every time), and it had been cooled during the day so the bottom side had some ripples on it.  Oh, well.  Without a honey harvest this year, I don't have good wax, so I may not pour another block this season.

I brought it to EAS and entered it into the show.  This show like the one at the state meeting in Georgia in 2008 only said a solid block of wax. In other words they did not require that it be simply a block that is square or rectangular.

 It is very difficult to pour a square or rectangular block because every flaw shows.  If you use a patterned mold, then it is easier to conceal the flaws and the block is not likely to crack.  This show is full of blocks poured into patterned molds. So my block is not destined for a ribbon this time around.

Maybe instead of sticking to tradition, I should use a patterned mold as well for the next show.  Maybe I'll find a patterned mold before the Metro show in September. (Oops - guess mentally healthier is not where I am going!).

I did enter several other things - I entered my attempt at creamed honey so that I could get the judge's comments on what I need to do differently.  I entered photography in several categories and I entered my cross stitch in the crafts category.

Queen from Don K in Lula

To add to my list of woes this year - no honey, absconded hive, bad bee luck, I opened my remaining hive at home to find that they were queenless.  So I called Don K in Lula and asked if he had queens - of course he did, so I arranged to drive up to pick one up.

Don feeds his bees all year long - a mixture of his own version of Honey Bee Healthy with wintergreen so strong it makes my eyes burn.  The bees are always gathered around his feeders which sit on barrels of sugar syrup.


He caught the queen in his hands to mark her for me.  I didn't need him to mark her, but I wanted to see him do it.


Here he holds her by the legs.


And here she is with a bright florescent orange dot on her back.

I brought her home and installed her in the queenless hive.  This hive has several empty boxes or almost empty so while I had the hive open, I culled out empty frames and rearranged honey filled frames. 

Meanwhile as I put the hive back together, the air was filled with swirling bees.  Robbers - probably from the absconded hive which isn't far from here I'm sure.  What a mess!  I put on the robber screen - luckily it was around 7:30 PM and got the sprinkler and set it up to spray over the hive.  By nightfall, it was all over and the robbing had stopped.  

I left the robber screen on the front of the hive because I will be away all week at the meeting of the Eastern Apicultural Society in Boone, NC and don't want to come back to a robbed out hive.  

Absconding vs. Colony Collapse Disorder

I find myself thinking about Alexander and the Terrible Horrible No Good Very Bad Day. Alexander is having such a bad time of it that he thinks throughout the book that he would like to move to Australia.

Although I imagine that Australian beekeepers have it pretty good - at least down there it's winter and if you are a beekeeper you are hoping your bees make it through the winter. Me, I'm struggling with my bees not making it through the summer.

So I came back from helping my brother in Natchez to find that Mellona was completely empty. The bees had absconded.

Beekeeping is an interesting challenge for me on so many levels. I have struggled all my life as an oldest child in my family, because I always feel like I have to get it right, make an A, follow the rules. Boy, beekeeping is really throwing a wrench into the works. I am forced as a beekeeper to face this "follow the rules and get it right" issue all the time.

So I switched hive positions, moving Mellona which was housed in three boxes - two 10 frame and one 8 frame - into the position of the Easter hive which had five ten frame boxes stacked. Mellona was then bursting out with bees at every possible opening, as the bees from the Easter hive returned to their old hive position.

But they hadn't used the frames in the top box so I didn't add a box. After all, the rule is to add a box when the box below is built out 80 %.

Also, I realized that they weren't solid with honey but didn't feed them because I thought they could manage with what is blooming now (although we are in a dearth). And I didn't want to feed sugar water before fall, if then, because it isn't natural.  And the rule is to feed the bees going into the fall, if you are going to feed them.  Not in the middle of the summer.

Well, pride goeth before a fall and all of that. Mellona absconded, leaving NOTHING behind. No bees, no brood, no honey, absolutely nothing.  A great lot of good it did for me to follow the rules so rigidly.

I sat down on my deck, smoker beside me, and cried. Why didn't I give them a box so they could spread out more? Why didn't I recognize that they needed food? Of course they've been gone for days and I have no clue where they went. There's no nectar anywhere in my neighborhood right now.

The pictures below show what they left - NOTHING.


Swarming:  A method of hive reproduction in which the queen and half of the bees in the hive leave to start a new hive, leaving behind the other half of the bees, queen cells, brood, honey, pollen

Absconding:  A desperate hive leaves with all the bees, the queen and everything else except the honeycomb. This happens when circumstances are not survivable in the hive as it is constituted.  The hive has no stores and no room.

Colony Collapse Disorder:  Adult bees are gone, but honey, pollen and some brood remain behind. The difference in absconding and CCD is that the honey, pollen and brood are left behind  Sometimes the queen and a handful of bees are left in the hive.  Opportunists (SHB and wax moths) seem slower to take over when CCD is the cause of the dead hive.
Robbing:  You can see dead bees and parts of bees on the tops of the frames and strewn all over the screened bottom board.  The edges of what had been capped honey are ripped, ragged and torn.  The hive may survive but the bees are disheartened and have no stores.

I remember last fall hearing a new beekeeper saying that she lost her first hive to colony collapse disorder. She didn't, I'm sure. I imagine she managed her hives as badly as I did this one and they absconded.

When bees leave at this time of year, that's what is going on. They have no stores and no hope because there's a dearth.  These bees were also bearding off of the hive in every single space - they didn't have enough room.  Then the bees leave because they have no hope of surviving in the hive as it is. They will probably die wherever they went, but they don't know anything else to do.

I am absolutely distressed.

See - completely empty comb. It hasn't been robbed out. You can tell because the edges of the comb are smooth - no torn and ripped wax. There just were no stores for these bees.  And not enough room.  Because the beekeeper was too rigid about following the rules.



The screened bottom board wasn't strewn with dead bodies (as it would be if the hive had been robbed out)  - just a little detrius from the hive.



I put the frames out on the deck to kill any wax moths who might feel inclined to take up residence.

 My dog Hannah is looking through the deck railing for the absconded hive.

And I am despondent.....it's a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.