|
Top or Bottom Bee Space |
If anyone knows of any inacuracies in this text I would be obliged to receive corrections.
Even many years before I started beekeeping I had a passionate interest
in bees, beekeeping methods and beekeeping equipment. One of the
things that interested me was the design of equipment. (By trade I was
a design engineer and trouble shooter.) I saw various arguments in bee
books about top or bottom bee space. As I intended to keep bees myself
at some unspecified time in the future I decided to sort this out once
and for all.
the
amount of propolis produced by bees in boxes with bottom bee space that those
with top bee space.
the amount of
propolis in joining the brood frames at the top where they were flush with the
top of the box was a deterrent to manipulation in so far as it upset the bees
when one had to separate during manipulations.
One pitfall with bottom beespace hives on 2 boxs
is the tendancy for the bees to stick the frame ends of the bottom box to the bottom
of the upper box and then get very cross when you separate them.
The way I aproached this was to form four columns on a large piece of
paper these were "for top" "against top" "for bottom" "against bottom"
I then read all I could (about 300 books) and whenever something was
relevent I would put a one line note in the appropriate column. I have
searched high and low for this document as it represented a great deal
of effort, but I cannot find it! this is frustrating as would like to
put together a definitive lecture on the subject. I will, when time
permits, re-do this exercise but for the time being all I can offer is
that there was an overwhelming set of reasons in favour of top bee
space. As a result of this all the equipment that I have designed and built for my
own use has been top bee space but in all other respects has been
British Standard National. When I have re-gathered all the relevent
information I will publish it here.
