Our Three Top Bar Hives

The first thing to know about our hives is our primary focus: creating a healthy hive for healthy honeybees.
​Ease of use by the beekeeper, aesthetics and long life of the hive though while important, become secondary concerns for us. The bees come first! That is why each hive uses untreated wood in its construction. The couple exterior places we use glue, it dries to a non toxic bonding agent and is not accessible to the bees. We don't include plastic or petroleum based items in or on our hives. On hives with an observation window the caulking is non-toxic. And although we recommend sealing your hive, we use 100% Tung Oil on our personal hives. Yes, it is expensive and a little bit hard to find without any thinners.
So there you have it: Healthy hives for Healthy Honeybees.
Simple!

Please click below for details on a specific hive-

The Trillium

The Daffodil

The Crocus

All of our locally handcrafted hives have a few features in common regardless of which you choose:

• The best construction techniques used to build your hive - things like pilot holes, counter sinking, routing and repeated measuring... important in dealing with soft wood exposed to the elements!
• Materials meant to stand up to the weather - Stainless steel, silicon bronze and exterior fasteners. Pine and cedar, Oak and Sapele.... and yep, you still should seal the wood!
• Designed to keep fastener stress on the cedar to a minimum and weight more directly supported by the cradle or hive end stands. 
• Built to easily accommodate your choices of IPM (Integrated Pest Management).
• Top Bars that encourage straight comb building and strong attachments - triangular in cross section and with small 'ears' that rest on the hive body - no grooves or splines need to be added.
• Hive End Stands that keep your hive bottom from resting on the ground and allow Screened Bottom Boards.
• Multiple entrances in front and back mean one hive can be managed for the 2 Queen System, 3 individual nucleus hives or to raise queens!
• Compatible top bars with all our hives and other popular hives allow interchangeability!
• Additional options for select hives to customize to your style and liking!
• Hive End Stands allow this hive to be used without a cradle. It can be placed on the ground or a flat surface and it will resist tipping over!
• All hives are unstained, unpainted and untreated and constructed with contaminant-free and non-toxic materials!
• Two follower boards, thirty top bars, ten spacers and five corks are included with each hive.​
• Free local delivery to your location of up to 50 miles from Oak Harbor, Whidbey Island, Washington!

Accessories for your Top Bar Hive!

Why Top Bar Hives?

Good question! Let's take a look at some Top Bar Hive Pros and Cons.

Pros

• Less weight to lift - The weight of a top bar full of honey is only 6 or 7 pounds. Some hive styles may require lifting 60, 70, or 80 pounds or more to harvest honey. Top Bar Hives often are placed where they are at a comfortable working height with no need to stoop over.
• No need for plastic foundation - The bees build natural comb how they want for workers, drones, queens and honey!
• Bees build their own small celled comb - If you want to practice IPM (Integrated Pest Management) methods of varroa control, maintaining small cells in the comb is one management technique (some would say the results are debatable)! 
• Delicate handling is a must! - A soft touch with your bees is necessary to prevent comb damage. A bonus is you learn to move slow and not kill bees when moving hive components around!
• ​A honey harvest is a wax harvest - This reduces contaminate and pesticide build up in the wax of the hive. Each year, the bees need to replace this lost comb with brand new contaminate-free wax!
• Storage of non-used bee equipment is minimal - Most top bar hive equipment or old comb can be stored in the individual hive.
•  Hive inspections are less intrusive - Only a couple combs at a time need be removed to observe the health of your bees. This disrupts the bees less and preserves the climate inside the hive better than removing their entire roof!
• ​Less equipment needed - For many, shunning the use of smokers to the unnecessary expensive stainless steel extractor and all its equipment is a welcome change to their wallet and space needs!
• Smaller harvests throughout the season - Many beekeepers practice small harvests of a few combs multiple times during the year instead of a large one time affair. This also allows one to better judge how much honey the bees may need for winter and to just leave it in the hive. Smaller harvests are also a simple way to obtain  'varietal' honey (honey from one particular plant), a comb, few combs or many combs all at the appropriate time!
• ​Aesthetically pleasing in neighborhood backyards - yeah, I know this one is subjective but we just had to add it!                                                   

Cons

• Said to produce less honey - although this is disputed, it does make sense that since the entire comb is consumed in a top bar harvest, that more honey must be used to rebuild the lost combs.
• There are no construction standards for a Top Bar Hive - Very true! Our hives address this head on by making all our hive parts interchangeable with every other companion part! We also love the philosophy and hive dimensions of Christy Hemenway of Gold Star Honeybees so all our hives have 'standardized' their dimensions to work with our hives!
• Delicate handling is a must! -  This becomes a disadvantage if you come to Top Bar Hives after learning beekeeping on other styles of hives where rough handling is normal. The delicate combs of a Top Bar Hive don't allow that!
•  More inspections early on - When starting a package or nuc in a new hive they can quickly run out of room and make plans to swarm! Beekeepers with Top Bar Hives frequently add new bars to the brood nest to help the bees feel their hive is roomy enough! One delightful way to reduce this task is to get a Top Bar hive with a window. Many of these early inspections are as simple as opening a shutter and looking inside! No disturbance at all! And entertaining!
• Many accessories hard to find or unavailable for Top Bar Hives - Queen rearing setups, feeding systems, bottom boards and all manner of accessories are plentiful for many other hive styles. Not so for Top Bars mainly due to no hive standardization. We are changing that by making our hive components interchangeable with themselves and other popular hive styles. We also create many of the above items to have them available for the Top Bar beekeeper!
• Scarce literature available specific to Top Bar beekeeping - Also true, but only when compared to other well known hive styles. Most of the books available for Top Bar hives are awesome! We will be adding a resource list that includes the books we found most useful.

​​Please note! 
Some of these features could easily be introduced to another hive style and some features of other hives could be brought to the Top Bar Hive. Our Pros and Cons above merely reflect the most common uses of a particular hive style.

Winter 2018 is still here...
But we're ready for Spring!

Doug@rainshadowhomesteaders.com​
​
​316 SE Pioneer Lane, #108 Oak Harbor, Wa 98277