Top Bar Hive inspection

[Boom Buzz]

Thought I'd share some pics of my friends inspection of his TBH.  This is his first year and his two hives have done great.  The hives are designed to take a medium frame but for now he is using top bars.  The hives are equivalent to about 4 medium supers.  One hive had all but about 8 frames filled with comb.  Of the remaining 8 frames 5 were partially filled with comb and honey.  Also in the pics is his nifty top bar rack to place frames while we works the hive or to set apart frames for harvest. 

Hope this link works -

http://picasaweb.google.com/holdthematers/2009DelchisBees?authkey=Gv1sRgCLqU97HBg8O2Cg&feat=email#

One question - both of us being new to beekeeping, we were wondering how much honey to leave for the bees and how much to harvest.  I think there were 20 full frames of brood and honey, 12 full frames of honey, 5 frames of partial and 3 frames empty.  He pulled 5 of the full honey frames and replaced them with 5 more empty frames.  We probably still have 4 to 8 weeks of season left here in Colorado so some of the partials could be filled out further.  Did he leave enough stores for the winter?  Or should he put back a few of the frames?  Any comments appreciated! 

Thanks

John

[Cheryl]

That's a nice hive design. I like the long bars and shallow box. I follow a similar pattern with mine, so weight is distributed evenly like that -- less likely to have comb collapse, especially in my hot climate.

Beautiful comb, too! Thanks for the photos!

[GaryMinckler]

Nice!!  I like the hive design.  Is there much brace comb?  Any more or any less than a  TBH with slanted walls? 

[Boom Buzz]

Thanks Cheryl and Gary for the comments.  Regarding brace comb, I don't have experience with a slanted TBH, however on Delchi's hive every frame had some degree of brace comb on both sides, and many were attached at the bottom.  With two of us working with hive tools it was fairly straight forward to extract the frames.

Note the observation windows - pretty cool!  But they also give idea of frame connected to sides by comb.

John