Beekeeping equipment in place and ready!

We set up our new Top Bar Bee Hives today. All we need now is bees!

Here are a few pics of the process. First we had to choose the hives. Since we were at the Mother Earth News Fair to make the decision to go for honey production or not, we spent a fair amount of time learning about the hives, different designs, uses, and approaches. At the end we chose to go with "Top Bar Hives"  because they seemed the most natural for the bees, and the easiest to learn with, although perhaps slightly higher maintenance and slightly lower honey production.  Overall it seemed the best choice.

To save time right now we decided to purchase ready built hives instead of building them myself. The Top bar hives seem easy enough to make, and I probably will in the future for expansion, but we wanted to get started ASAP since it is already late in the season to start bees.  So we chose to buy instead of build.  The next decision was from where.

There are plenty of choices out there for top bar hive designs. All are basically the same with only minor differences here and there. We chose to go with the hives from Bee Thinking in Portland Oregon for the following reasons:

1. Made from cedar - This lessens the need for treating the wood or painting it over time while extending the life. Paint on wood treatments not only add work over time but increase the chance of poisons getting in the honey or damaging hte bees.  I was concerned with cedar itself as a beehive but there seems plenty of evidence that bees do in fact nest in cedar trees in the wild.
2. Hinged top - Top bar hives all have some sort of top covering to protect from the weather. I wanted a solid wood top, and hinging it instead of lifting it certainly sounds attractive!
3. end and middle access holes - These hives are designed with both end and middle access holes, so the choice of building the comb end to middle or middle to end is easy to make any time, and easy to explore options (of course i could just drill a hole in any hive)
4. Solid bottom - I contemplated the screen bottom hives and in the end chose solid bottom for 3 reasons: 1) screen bottoms are mostly useful to check for mite problems. Top Bar hives are not supposed to have mite problems, so the reason is minimized. 2) ventilation may actually be a negative in the summer for my area since bees have natural ways of cooling closed spaces in summer as long as there isn't too much airflow outside of their control. In nature bees prefer closed spaces.  3) bees tend to clean up their own space with a solid bottom, which allows for more natural activity and responsibility.
5. Observation window large enough to watch the bees and progress without disturbing them.
6. Close supplier - I decided against buying hives from out of state because of shipping cost, and also I wanted someone more local to work with in case of problems, someone who knew this area and bees natural ways here.

So, we searched out the top bar hive suppliers along hte route from the fair grounds to our area and found  BeeThinking in Portland. We called him Monday morning and the owner agreed to meet us at his warehouse at noon.  When we arrived and looked at his hives, they matched all the criteria we had set, so we decided to go for it. We purchased 3 hives, a suit, and some basic tools.

Here are the 3 hive bodies strapped to the top of our truck.

The box with all the internal pieces sits on the one spare seat inside, the legs lay across the floorboard in front of the middle seats.

In the back sits the tops to the three hives, they barely fit on top of our luggage for the weekend stay with 4 children.

Here is the completely assembled hive with the top open and all the top bars installed.

Notice the observation door in the front. It will be exciting to see the bees building and working inside without disturbing them.

Here is a quick shot of hte top bars. Notice the ridge across the top where the bees will attach their comb.

And here are all three new hives assembled and each sitting under a tree in the far corner of the front yard.

UPDATE: It appears that there are no bees available for purchase from breeders this time of year, which means that the only option left to populate these hives before winter is catching a wild swarm. Swarms should be plentiful though, as it is the time of year they will naturally be looking for new homes anyway.  Scary but yet exciting!