top bar width

[gmcharlie]

I was looking on MB site and he list 1 1/4  for brood and  1 1/2 for honey.....  THe drawings I got from another site liste 1 3/8  (thats what i made all of them as I wasn't sure how many brood frames and how many honey,  although I may change if it will help corall the queen in the brood.     Watching some  YOU TUBE videos  some of those top bars looked as wide as 2".....I also noticed most did NOT have starter strips (didn't see any that did)  and yet they built straight.....  do they pick up the cracks and just know where to build?  and is there an advatage to really wide top bars??

[trapperbob]

 If I remember right he makes all of his bars 1 1/4 and then makes 1/4 spacers to put on each side of the bars for honey. This way you always have bars to put in the broodnest to prevent swarming by opening the broodnest. Then when you work the combs to the outside of the broodnest you can add the spacers for honey. This is what I do and it has the advantage of always having bars for brood and you always have fresh comb with very little to no chemical build up. I'm always making something out of 1x material and have a few peices left over so I make spacers out of them and throw them in a box. This way I waste as little material as possible and the rest becomes smoker material even the sawdust.

[Michael Bush]

http://www.bushfarms.com/beesframewidth.htm

I went to the 1 1/4" after building top bar hives and trying 1 1/2" and 1 3/8" spacing.  What I found was that the bees were building the brood spacing at 1 1/4" and the honey at 1 1/2" no matter what I made the bars.  I decided not to fight them on it.

[Grandma_DOG]

Once the bees start building honeycomb storage past the broodnest, they like 1.5 to 1.75" combs. I don't think they got the memo to stay at 1.25". 

I don't fight 'em. I simply learned to cut wider bars that I stick in the back of the hive. My brood nest is usually the first 10-12 combs. The next 15 are fatter bars.