Top bar hive: Day 1
Our friends Everett and Missy are getting into building and
selling top bar hives, and we've agreed to help them with some field
testing.
We considered building one
ourselves, but with the Spring garden rush we couldn't seem to find
enough spare time.
They're still working out the
website details, but if you want to experiment with a top bar hive, Easyhives.com can save you a lot of time at a
price much lower than the competition.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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I am so excited that you are doing using a Top Bar hive. I am not a hive keeper, but hope to one day be one. From my limited research Top Bar hives are very attractive to me.
Everett and Missy's hives look beautiful! Did they take inspiration from your Micro Business book?
Emily --- The hive is so beautiful I dreamed about it last night! (I think I was painting it white.)
Everett does say our microbusiness has been an inspiration to him, although half the techniques we use, we learned from him.... We're hoping their microbusiness takes off and gives them more free time so we can see them more!
De,
They'd be fine. If you're checking on your bees every week you're probably just going to do more harm than good.
Thanks for helping us test this out Anna!
Everett
De --- I agree with Everett --- bees don't need much time at all (although it does take some research at first to learn about them). I'd say the least time-consuming livestock are compost worms, then honeybees, then chickens (with rabbits in there somewhere --- I haven't kept them myself, so can't tell you where.)
Everett --- Thanks so much for the opportunity! We're looking forward to learning about top bar hives hands on.