🐝 Hives and Equipment

The Kenyan Top Bar Hive is the workhorse of African small-scale beekeeping, and it earns that position for one reason: it is the cheapest hive from which you can lift out a comb, look at it, and put it back.

That single ability separates the whole modern class of hives from the traditional class. In a log hive the bees glue the comb to the walls and you cannot see inside. In a KTBH the bees build each comb hanging from a loose wooden bar that rests across the top of the hive. Lift the bar and the comb comes with it. Nothing supports the comb at the sides or the bottom. That is why it is called a movable-comb hive, or a transitional hive: it sits between the fixed-comb log and the four-sided frame hive of the Langstroth.

The defining feature of the Kenyan design is that the sides slope inwards towards the floor. This is not decoration and it is not to save timber. Bees attach comb to whatever wall it touches. If the wall is vertical, the comb meets it flat and is welded along its whole edge, and when you lift the bar the comb either tears or stays behind. If the wall slopes away from the comb, the comb hangs free and touches the wall only lightly, or not at all. The attachment area is small and the comb comes out clean. That is the entire design idea of the KTBH, and once you understand it you can judge any hive anyone offers you by looking at the angle of the walls.

The sourced dimensions, from a general hive reference, are these. Overall length roughly one metre, about three feet. Width and height between 30 cm and 50 cm, that is twelve to twenty inches. The side slope from vertical most commonly recommended at 30 degrees. Top bar length 430 to 510 mm, seventeen to twenty inches. Top bar width 32 to 35 mm, and for African bees you use the lower part of that, 32 to 34 mm, for the reasons set out in Lesson 5.

Be careful with the status of those numbers. The reference states plainly that these describe what is commonly published, not a national standard. The authoritative Kenyan standard drawing was not retrieved. The Kenyan practical guide refers its readers to its own construction figure without printing the numbers in the text. So treat the dimensions above as a good working pattern, and if you are building for sale or for a project, obtain the national standard drawing from your county agriculture or livestock office or the national beekeeping association before you cut a hundred hives.

One dimension you must not exceed. Maximum safe hive depth is 300 mm, twelve inches. Deeper than that and, in the words of the source, the weight of the comb filled with honey tends to cause it to fall off. Think about what that means on a hot African afternoon. A deep comb full of unripe honey, warm, heavy, hanging from a single bar with no side or bottom support. You lift it, it breaks away, and it drops into the hive. You now have crushed comb, running honey, a badly provoked defensive colony, and a strong chance the colony absconds within days. The 300 mm limit is the most practically important number in the whole hive section, and it costs you nothing to respect it.

The number of top bars in a standard KTBH was not retrieved. You derive it yourself, which is better anyway because your hive is the hive you must fill. The arithmetic is simple.

1. Measure the internal length of the hive at the top, where the bars sit. Say 1,000 mm.
2. Choose your bar width. Say 33 mm, in the middle of the African range.
3. Divide. 1,000 divided by 33 = 30.3, so about 30 bars.
4. Now subtract for the end space and for a follower board if you use one, so plan on a little under 30 and cut a few spare.

The follower board is a solid board the same shape as the hive cross-section, which you slide in behind the last comb to make the cavity smaller. A small swarm in a large hive struggles to keep the space warm and defended. Shrink the hive to the colony, then move the board back as the colony grows. It is a five-minute piece of carpentry that raises your chance of a swarm staying put.

There are two different hives being called Tanzanian, and confusing them will cost you. One is a historical design. The other is what you will actually be offered in a shop or by a carpenter.

The original Tanzanian hive was designed by G. Ntenga in 1972. The sourced features of that original design are these. It held 28 combs. It offered top bars in a 60 mm option, about two and a quarter inches, where each wide bar would carry two combs, as an alternative to 30 mm single-comb bars at about one and a quarter inches. The lugs, the ends of the bar that rest on the hive walls, were narrower than the bar itself. And the hive had two lids, each covering half the hive.

That last feature is worth pausing on, because it is a genuinely good idea that has been lost. Two half-lids mean you open half the hive at a time. Half the colony stays covered, dark and calm while you work the other half. With defensive African bees, anything that reduces the area of open hive and the length of time it stays open reduces your risk and reduces the disturbance that drives absconding. If you are having hives built, ask for two lids.

Now the correction that matters commercially. The hive sold today in English-speaking countries as Tanzanian is a straight-sided box, unlike Ntenga's original, and the reference states plainly that it is really a Kenyan-design variant. So when someone says Tanzanian hive today they almost always mean a rectangular box with vertical walls and top bars across it.

In current practice, then, the useful distinction is not national at all. It is about the walls.

A Kenyan Top Bar Hive has sloping sides. Comb releases from the wall easily. It is more forgiving of imperfect bar width, because a comb that wanders slightly off its bar still has room to hang without welding itself along a vertical face.

A Tanzanian Top Bar Hive as now sold has straight sides. It is simpler and cheaper to build, because it is a rectangular box with no angled cuts. Any carpenter who can make a crate can make one, and you can make one yourself with a handsaw and a square. But the combs attach to the walls, and they must be cut free with a knife at every single inspection.

That cutting is the whole trade-off, and you should understand what it costs before you buy on price. Every time you cut a comb free from a wall you do four things. You slow the inspection down, and with African bees a slow inspection is a dangerous inspection. You risk breaking the comb, especially a heavy honey comb in the heat. You spill honey inside the hive, which can start robbing and attracts ants and small hive beetle. And you damage comb, which is one of the structural triggers of absconding. Do that at every inspection for a year and the cheaper hive has stopped being cheaper.

So how do you choose?

Choose the straight-sided TTBH if you have no cash, no power tools and limited carpentry skill, if timber is expensive and you want to waste none on angled offcuts, or if you are building many hives quickly for a bait-hive programme where most will be left alone for long periods anyway. Accept that you will carry a sharp, thin, long knife on every inspection and that you will work more slowly.

Choose the sloping-sided KTBH if you intend to inspect regularly, if you are learning and will therefore open hives more often than an expert would, if you expect to harvest comb honey where breakage destroys the product, or if you work in high heat where combs soften.

One thing both hives share, and it is the thing that actually decides whether either of them works: the bar width. A straight-sided hive with correct 32 to 34 mm bars and a colony that builds straight comb is a perfectly workable hive. A sloping-sided hive with 38 mm bars cut from a European book is cross-combed rubbish. The wall angle is a convenience. The bar width is a requirement. Lesson 5 deals with it.

The Langstroth is the world's dominant movable-frame hive and it is what most African modern hive or box hive programmes distribute. In a frame hive the comb is built inside a four-sided wooden frame, supported on all sides. That support is the difference. A framed comb can be spun in an extractor at speed, emptied of honey, and given straight back to the bees intact.

Start with what this course will not tell you. No Langstroth dimension was obtained from an extension or standards source. All Langstroth box and frame dimensions are not retrieved. The commonly circulated figures, the nineteen-inch frame top bar, the nine and five-eighths inch deep box, the three-eighths inch bee space, are unverified here, because the sources that came back were commercial retailer pages, and a retailer page is not adequate authority for a dimension that must be cut to a fraction of a millimetre. If you are going to build Langstroth equipment, obtain the manufacturer's drawing or a national standards drawing first. A frame hive built to guessed dimensions is worse than no frame hive, because the bee space will be wrong throughout and the bees will glue and brace every frame in the box.

Now what is sourced, and what it actually says.

On yield, frame hives are the highest-yielding class in African on-farm comparisons. In Tigray, Ethiopia, frame or modern hives produced 22.8 kg per hive per year against 17.8 kg for the Kenyan top bar hive. That is a real advantage and you should not dismiss it.

But the gap is not always large. In Gedeo in southern Ethiopia, Zander frame hives gave 13.4 kg against 12.5 kg for the KTBH. Work that out. 13.4 minus 12.5 is 0.9 kg. On 12.5 that is about a 7 percent advantage. In Tigray, 22.8 against 17.8 is 5 kg, about a 28 percent advantage. Two African studies, two very different answers, and neither is wrong. What it tells you is that the frame hive advantage depends on management, forage and season, and that anyone quoting you a single national figure has not read the literature.

Against those yields, set the cost. The sourced statement is blunt: a modern hive costs three times as much as a Kenyan top bar hive. So in Tigray you paid three times as much for 28 percent more honey. In Gedeo you paid three times as much for 7 percent more honey. Do that arithmetic before you take a loan.

And now the fact that is routinely left out of extension teaching, and which can reverse the decision entirely. The honey to wax ratio is approximately 75 to 1 for frame hives, against about 10 to 1 for fixed-comb and top bar hives. Read that again slowly. From a frame hive, every 75 kg of honey yields about 1 kg of wax. From a top bar hive, every 10 kg of honey yields about 1 kg of wax. That is roughly seven and a half times more wax per kilogram of honey from the top bar hive.

The reason is mechanical, not magical. In a frame hive you extract the honey and give the comb back, so the wax stays in the hive and works for another season. In a top bar hive you cut the comb off the bar to harvest, so the wax comes out with the crop every time.

Work a comparison. Suppose two hives, one frame at 22.8 kg and one KTBH at 17.8 kg, using the Tigray figures.

1. Frame hive wax: 22.8 divided by 75 = about 0.30 kg.
2. KTBH wax: 17.8 divided by 10 = about 1.78 kg.
3. The top bar hive gives about 1.48 kg more wax per year and 5 kg less honey.

Whether that is a good trade depends entirely on the price of wax against the price of honey in your own market this month. This course gives you no prices, because no current sourced African price for honey or wax was obtained. What it gives you is the calculation. Get your local honey price per kilogram and your local wax price per kilogram, multiply them out as above, and see which hive wins where you live. Do not assume the frame hive wins. Extension programmes assume it constantly and they are assuming, not calculating.

One last practical point. A frame hive only pays for itself if you can extract. An extractor is a serious purchase and is usually cooperative-owned. If there is no extractor within reach of your apiary, you will end up crushing your framed combs like a top bar beekeeper, and you will have paid three times the price for nothing.

Traditional hives still hold the majority of African colonies. In Baringo County, Kenya, 62.4 percent of surveyed beekeepers used traditional hives and only 37.6 percent used modern ones. A log hollowed out and capped at both ends, a cylinder of bark sewn shut, a clay pot, a woven basket, a gourd. The bees attach comb to the walls and it cannot be lifted out intact. That is what fixed-comb means.

Do not teach or think about these hives as simply backward. That attitude has wasted a great deal of donor money, because it leads to handing out modern hives to people whose real constraint was never the hive. Traditional hives have genuine advantages and you should know them.

Cost is near zero and the materials are local. A log hive is made from a tree and a day of labour. There is no supplier, no transport cost, no waiting, and no debt.

They are often better colonised, which surprises people. In Gedeo, southern Ethiopia, hive occupancy was 48.7 percent for traditional hives, 59.5 percent for the KTBH and 52.6 percent for the Zander frame hive. The modern frame hive did not win on occupancy. It sat between the other two. Swarms do not read project documents.

They give the best wax return, at about 10 kg of honey for every 1 kg of wax, the same ratio as top bar hives and roughly seven and a half times better than the 75 to 1 of frame hives.

And a hung log hive is defensible against honey badger and ants in a way a ground-standing box is not. Hang it high on greased wire between two posts and the badger cannot knock it down and the ants cannot climb to it. In much of Africa this is not a small point, it is the difference between keeping your colonies and losing them.

Now the disadvantages, and the first of them is disqualifying for anyone who wants to run a business.

You cannot inspect. That is the whole of it. Disease, queen failure, laying workers and pest build-up are all invisible until the colony is lost. Everything you learn about reading a brood pattern, checking for eggs, spotting queen cells, catching foulbrood early, all of it is unusable. You are farming blind. You will find out that a colony died when you go to harvest and it is empty, and you will never know why, which means you cannot stop it happening to the next one.

Harvest destroys comb and usually brood. You cut the combs out. The colony must rebuild everything from nothing, which sets it back badly and often triggers absconding, so you can lose the colony as a direct result of harvesting it.

And honey quality is low. Crushed brood, pollen and larvae go into the honey along with the nectar. This is exactly why so much African honey is sold as low-value crude honey. It is not a marketing problem. It is a harvesting method problem that starts with the hive.

The yield evidence, and read the basis of each figure carefully because they are not all the same measurement. Traditional hives yielded 5.5 kg per hive per year in Gedeo. A national average of 8 to 15 kg per hive was cited for Ethiopian traditional hives. A review cited a further study giving traditional 9 kg, transitional 16 kg and modern 22 kg per hive per year.

Take that last row and work the gap. From 9 kg traditional to 16 kg transitional is 7 kg more, which is about 78 percent more honey. And the transitional hive is the top bar hive, which you can build yourself from sawn timber, and which you can inspect. The single largest step in yield in that comparison is not from top bar to frame, it is from traditional to top bar. It is also the cheapest step and the one that unlocks every management skill in this course.

So the honest position. If you have no cash and no tools, a hung traditional hive is a real option and it will produce honey. Understand precisely what you are choosing: a hive you cannot inspect, a harvest that destroys the nest, and a crop that will sell at crude honey prices. Plan to move to top bar hives as your first reinvestment, and build them from your own honey money rather than waiting for someone to give you a frame hive.

This is the most commercially important number in the whole equipment module, and it is the one most often got wrong.

Comb spacing is the distance from the centre of one comb to the centre of the next. It is a property of the bee, not of the beekeeper. You do not choose it. You either match it or you fight it, and you will lose.

The sourced figures, from Bees for Development, are these. African Apis mellifera: 32 to 34 mm. European Apis mellifera: 36 to 38 mm. Apis cerana, the Asian hive bee: 29 to 31 mm. A second source gives KTBH top bars as 32 to 35 mm, one and a quarter to one and three-eighths inches, which overlaps the African figure at the lower end.

The teaching rule is simple. For African bees, cut top bars at 32 to 34 mm.

Why does the bar width set the comb spacing? Because in a top bar hive the bars lie edge to edge across the top of the hive, forming a solid ceiling. Each comb hangs from the centre line of its bar. So the distance between comb centres is exactly the width of a bar. The top bar width incorporates both the bee space and the thickness of the comb. Cut a 33 mm bar and you get 33 mm spacing. There is no adjustment available afterwards.

Now the important part: what actually goes wrong at European spacing.

Bees build comb at their own spacing regardless of what you have provided. If you give African bees 38 mm bars, they will not build thicker combs to fill the space, and they will not politely centre one comb per bar. They will build at about 33 mm centres, which does not line up with a 38 mm ceiling. Within a few bars the combs have drifted sideways relative to the bars. By the fifth or sixth comb, a comb that started at the centre of one bar is now attached to the join between two bars, or running diagonally across three of them.

That is cross-comb, and it is fatal to the hive as a management tool. Lift a bar and you are lifting part of two or three combs, which tear. The hive is no longer a movable-comb hive. It has become an expensive log hive. You cannot inspect. You cannot check for disease. You cannot split. You cannot harvest selectively. Every advantage you paid for is gone.

The reference states it plainly: get the bar width wrong and the bees build across bars instead of along them, and the hive stops being a movable-comb hive. This is the commonest reason a home-made top bar hive does not work. Not the timber, not the roof, not the site. The bars.

What happens the other way, if bars are too narrow? The bees run out of comb space and build the missing space somewhere else, usually as brace comb between bars and lid, or they propolise gaps shut. Less catastrophic than cross-comb but still bad. The 32 to 34 mm range is where you want to be.

How to actually cut bars accurately, which is where most people fail.

1. Decide one number and use it for every hive you own. 33 mm is a sensible middle. Consistency across your apiary matters, because you will want to move bars of brood between hives when you split.
2. Make a hardwood gauge block exactly 33 mm wide and check every bar against it. Do not trust a tape measure read repeatedly by a tired person in bad light.
3. Rip the bars from one board in one setting so they are all identical, rather than cutting a few at a time over several weeks.
4. Check the total. Twenty bars laid edge to edge at 33 mm should measure 660 mm. If they measure 700 mm, your bars are averaging 35 mm and you have a problem across the whole hive. This total check catches errors that eye inspection of a single bar never will.
5. Give the bees a starter guide down the centre line of each bar: a strip of wax, a bead of melted wax, or a thin sawn ridge. The guide tells them where to start and holds the comb on the centre line where it belongs.
6. Inspect early, at about one week, and straighten any comb that has started off the line by gently pushing it back. A young white comb can be moved. A month-old comb full of brood cannot.

One caution about the source. The reference notes that a standalone numeric bee space value for African bees was not retrieved. The top bar width figures are the practical form of the same constant, and they are what you should use. Do not go looking for an African bee space number in a European book and apply it to your bars.

Every price you have ever seen printed in a beekeeping book is wrong for you. Not approximately wrong, structurally wrong. This course will not give you a hive price, and you should be suspicious of any course that does.

Here is the honest position. The only sourced hive prices available were from a 2006 Kenyan guide: a KTBH at KSh 1,650, a bee suit at KSh 2,370, a smoker at KSh 500, hanging posts at KSh 150 each, a total start-up for 20 hives of KSh 41,720, and honey at KSh 100 per kilogram. Those figures are two decades old. Currency has moved, timber has moved, labour has moved. They are printed here only so you can see the structure of a cost list, and they must not be quoted at anyone.

The one durable, sourced cost relationship is this: a modern frame hive costs about three times as much as a Kenyan top bar hive. Ratios survive inflation. Prices do not. Take that ratio to your carpenter and use it to check whether the quote you are being given is sane.

So you must build the list yourself. The structure of the capital list, one-off items, is this.

• Hives. The largest single line. Frame hive about three times a KTBH.
• Hanging posts and wire. Two posts per hive at two metre spacing, posts 2.5 to 3 m long, set 0.75 m into the ground.
• Protective clothing: suit, veil, gloves, boots. Non-negotiable with African bees. This is not the line to economise on.
• Smoker and hive tool.
• Food-grade harvesting buckets.
• Knife, strainer or straining cloth, settling container.
• Refractometer. The highest-value quality investment you can make, and often shared at cooperative level.
• Solar wax melter. Cheap to build, and it unlocks your wax income.
• Extractor. Only if you are using frame hives, and usually cooperative-owned.
• Storage containers, labels, packaging.

The recurring list, annual or variable:

• Labour, including your own at a real rate.
• Sugar for stimulative or emergency feeding, mixed at two parts sugar to one part water.
• Hive repair and replacement.
• Containers and packaging.
• Transport to market.
• Pest control materials.
• Licensing, registration and inspection fees. These are set by your national authority and differ by country. Ask your national or county agriculture or livestock department, or the national beekeeping association. This course states no fee.

Now the method. Get three quotations for every single line, this month, from three different suppliers or carpenters, and write the date beside each. Three is the minimum that shows you a range. One quotation is a rumour with a number on it.

Then turn capital into an annual cost, because a hive is not an expense in year one, it is an asset spread over its life. Annual ownership cost of an item is its cost divided by the number of years it will last. Be warned: the working life of a KTBH, a log hive and a Langstroth in African conditions was not retrieved. Nobody has published it. You must estimate it locally, by asking beekeepers how old their oldest working hive is, and it is a genuinely important number, so ask several people and take the low end.

The break-even formula, arithmetically universal:

Break-even price per kilogram = (annual ownership cost + variable cost) divided by kilograms produced.

And here is the step that catches everyone: kilograms produced is occupied hives times kilograms per occupied hive, not hives purchased times yield. Hives set out are occupied at 40 to 70 percent in Kenyan experience, 30 to 75 percent in another Kenyan district, and about 50 percent in the Gedeo survey where roughly half of all hives stood empty. Eighty percent is regarded as a good target in Kenyan extension.

Work it. Twenty KTBHs at 60 percent occupancy and 15 kg per occupied hive.

1. Occupied hives: 20 multiplied by 0.60 = 12.
2. Annual honey: 12 multiplied by 15 = 180 kg.
3. Annual wax at 10 to 1: 18 kg.

The same twenty hives at 80 percent occupancy and 18 kg give 288 kg of honey and 28.8 kg of wax. Same capital, same land, 60 percent more revenue. That is why occupancy and yield per hive are where the money is, and not hive count.

Finally, the point of the whole exercise. Compare your break-even price with the price you can actually get in your market. A published warning attached to this formula says explicitly that break-even prices may exceed what consumers are willing to pay. If your arithmetic says your honey must sell at more than any buyer will pay, you have just been given the most valuable lesson in this module, on paper, for free, before you borrowed the money.