Dear Beekeeping Friends,
 
The post from Rimantas about the long Dadant hive in Lithuania that had such
greater production got me to thinking about an experience I had with one of
my hive this past season.  It was a long top bar hive.  The queen was a
Carniolan from Glenn Apiaries in California.  The year before I had her in a
Langstroth hive (her first year) and she did very well, producing two shallow
supers of surplus honey.  This year, after being moved into the top bar hive,
I saw a phenomenon that I have not seen in any of my other hives.  Every top
bar comb from the front of the hive to the back (about 15-20 combs) had 3-5
inches of capped honey at the top and pollen and brood on the bottom.  There
was not a single comb that was entirely honey or entirely brood, even at the
very back away from the entrance.  The brood pattern was nice, the bees seemed
healthy, but the brood was spread out horizontally over the entire length of
this long top bar hive.  Since harvesting comb honey was going to be
destructive of brood comb, I did not take very much honey from this hive. With
hindsight, I now wish I had harvested anyway, because by midsummer the hive
had crashed from Varroa and was subsequently destroyed by wax moths while I was
away on vacation for a couple of weeks.  Back to the point I was going to make:
I wondered if these Carniolan bees I had might not have done better honey
production-wise had they been in a "vertical hive" such as a Langstroth hive or
a Dadant hive supered.  I suspect that the queen would have stayed down below,
filling up the bottom area with brood, but not going up vertically to lay
unless there were just not enough places to lay down below.  I don't believe
these were New World Carniolans because they were not advertised as such.  They
were just called Carniolans.  Is this a characteristic of Carniolans?  Maybe
the hot climate of Texas had some bearing on the brood pattern and the queen
preferred to stay down below where it was cooler? since Carniolans I hear do
well in cooler climates?  Has anyone else had a similar experience with
Carniolans?
 
Bee good.
 
Layne Westover
College Station, Texas, U.S.A. (look at a map for latitude and longitude)