Finally, succesfully moving bees from Langstroth to top bars

I traded a colony of bees (in a Langstroth box) for a top bar hive at the start of the year, and placed the Langstroth box on top of the top bar hive with the idea that they would just migrate downwards onto the top bars. To cut a long story short, after 11 months, that didn't work.

So I made a hive that had a Langstroth shaped box at one end of a Kenyan top bar hive body, and the bees had built almost a full comb on the top bars after five days! Anyway, if anyone is in the same situation, I'd recommend this approach rather than the "chop'n'crop" technique of trying to cut the comb off the frames and hanging it on the top bars.

nice work. that's a clever idea and well executed.

You sir are a mad genius!

Thanks for the compliments, I saw the original idea on the BioBees.com forums.

Brilliant!! I have yet another project to work on this winter. My TBH died out in the spring, but my Lang. is doing great.

I think an improved design would place the Lang box in the middle. This would be more work, of course, but it would also allow the bees to build out on their preferred side, or allow you to do a split from a single Lang colony into two TBH colonies.

Also, in this scenario, I would put the entrances on the ends of the TBH section, meaning the bees should move their brood raising off the Lang frames and nearer the entrance (as apparently they prefer to do).

Nice work, very interesting, I wondering if we can adapt the Langst side for flow hive frames ? Do you have plan and measurements for this hive? Thanks. Philippe

Just wondering if we can get an update on how things are going. I'm interested in seeing how they adjusted to moving from the frames to a more open system.