Offer: Place To Keep Bees Near Saskatoon

I live on a farm near Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.  Would like someone to keep bees here, for better pollination. No charge and no competition.  I'm not aware of any other honeybees for miles. About 15 miles north of the city, so would suit a city dweller who doesn't have the space to keep bees at home.  Not sure if they are even allowed in the city.  I'm most interested in someone who will use the Top Bar method, but this is not a must.

And if you have any beautiful women who need housing I've got room here in Alaska!

Why do you want someone else to keep bees? Why not get yourself a package and make an inexpensive topbar hive? I'm pretty sure some Russian bees could take care of themselves perfectly well with absolutely no intervention from you other than removing some full comb (both spent and honey laden) and some winter insulation.

Yeah, possibly.  Can you recommend a quick and effective top bar hive dsign?

Do you have access to a table saw?

Yes.

http://api.ning.com/files/liR6K4cRJpFmFayYTe7BSW6R3Fx8xm1y7ge9GB1T7RwE3ZhSuq8MmR3R3zH1irjIhR65bicbVb*vBC-REfjpuwXKUrnuJ8Oc/TopBar_BeeHive_Plans.pdf is pretty much the standard top bar hive. Like a langstroth most of the variation seems to be irrelevant, most of the work is up ti the bees anyways. As a note, if you do not remove the comb moths will do that for you.

I've ordered my bees.  They come in two standard beehive boxes (two supers high). I have this idea that I can build a top bar hive and mount it on top of the two original supers, with extra legs on the end of the top bar box to support it.

Then put a queen excluder grill between the two systems, so that the queen stays down in the two regular supers, while honey production happens "upstairs". I imagine they will fill the comb in the frames of the supers first, but I would expect them to go upstairs when they run out of space to put honey.

To work with the supers, I'll have a support system whereby I can simply slide the top bar box over, in order to access the supers. Since the queen will stay downstairs, I won't have to bother checking upstairs for queen cells.

Think it will work?

Hi Peter,
I'm curious how your bee operation worked last year? Did you build the top bar box on the supers like you mentioned? I'd love to see some pics! Any lessons learned?

Thanks

Lissa

I built one top bar hive, but it wasn't good enough for wintering the bees, so I transferred them back to the regular hive. I wintered two colonies and plan to build top bar homes for them this year. As well, for more colonies I'll probably purchase. My bees are active at this time, but no blossoms yet in this region. I am feeding them sugar water, as is commonly done here in spring and fall. Rudolph Steiner strongly recommends mixing the sugar with camomile tea, so this is what I'm doing.