Top-bar hive

A top-bar hive is a single-story frameless beehive in which the comb hangs from removable bars. The bars form a continuous roof over the comb, whereas the frames in most current hives allow space for bees to move up or down between boxes. Hives that have frames or that use honey chambers in summer but which use similar management principles as regular top-bar hives are sometimes also referred to as top-bar hives. Top-bar hives are rectangular in shape and are typically more than twice as wide as multi-story framed hives commonly found in English speaking countries. Top-bar hives usually include one box only, and allow for beekeeping methods that interfere very little with the colony.

Top-bar hives are popular with some beekeepers who believe it is a more natural form of beekeeping. Their building does not usually require such precise measurements as modern multi-story hives.

Although the two most well-known styles of long top-bar hives are named "Kenyan" and "Tanzanian", the Kenyan hive was actually developed in Canada, and the so-called Tanzanian hive is not the same as the top-bar hive that was developed in Tanzania.

The design of top-bar hives has its origins in the work done in 1965 by Tredwell and Paterson. A tub shaped top-bar hive was trialled in Rhodesia in the 1960s by Penelope Papadopoulou. Long top-bar hives began to appear in the 1960s and were first referred to as "grecian" hives. Similar "long" top-bar hives were also developed in the early 1970s by other authors. The David Hive (1972) was similar to the Kenyan top-bar hive, except that the comb was not cut from the bars at harvest time but reused after extraction. Also in 1972, William Bielby designed a top-bar hive that featured catenary curved comb.

Although modern "long" top-bar hives originated in the middle of the twentieth century, initially for use in development projects, a "tub shaped" top-bar hive has been in use for centuries in some regions such as Greece. An example of the tub shaped top-bar hive is the so-called Greek hive that was first described in the 17th century and has been used in Crete until recently. Tub shaped top-bar hives are usually small enough to be portable, and allow beekeeping methods that involve periodic merging and splitting of colonies.

Bee hives that conform to the general description of top-bar hives have existed for many centuries. The earliest known possible mention of a bee hive with removable top-bars is in Giovanni di Bernardo Rucellai's didactic poem Le Api, written in 1539.

The travelling pair George Wheler and Jacques Spon witnessed a beekeeping method using woven tub shaped top-bar hives in Greece in 1676. Spon briefly mentioned this in his memoirs, but Wheler gave a detailed description and a drawing of such a hive in his work Journey Into Greece, published in 1682. The dimensions of that hive (including the supposed width of the top-bars and the angle of the hive sides) are variously indicated in modern citations of Wheler's work, but that is pure fiction, since Wheler himself mentioned no dimensions in his book.

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