With hives in such close proximity to each other as they are in NYC, my
suggested ethical guidelines are taken from Genesis 4:9 - "You ARE your
brother's beekeeper".  

So, in self-defense, you must assist your brother to learn basic IPM metrics
and basic recordkeeping, so that each can see the tangible results of their
choice of approaches to deal with all the invasive exotic pathogens and
pests that have been delivered to our shores as a free gift of unregulated
uninspected World Trade with all the iPads and HDTVs.

Two things with top-bar hives:

1)  They need entrance reducers in fall more than traditional colonies, as
they never tend to reach the populations of vertically-oriented hives.  This
protects the TBH from being robbed, even if it is very weak, and thereby
protects your hives from being re-infested with varroa brought back by
robbers.

2)  TBHs are very much "comb at a time" management challenges, rather than
"box at a time", as is the case with vertically-oriented hives.  The lack of
ability to expand in the natural (vertical) direction bees encounter in tree
hollows means that the beekeeper is constantly moving an empty top bar to
the frontmost position, right at the entrance, to coax the bees into drawing
out that comb.  Forget to do this, and you end up with a colony of
less-than-critical-mass size.  Left alone, bees don't expand horizontally
all that much.

3)  The combs are fragile, and handling them is touchy, so a TBH is a
perfect hive for someone who does not inspect the hive.  Some TBH
enthusiasts have added a vertical stick down the centerline of the comb,
projecting downward from the top-bar to give the comb better structural
support, and they think that this is pretty neat.  I say "Go Big or Go
Home", and suggest that two such sticks be attached to each end of the top
bar projecting downward, parallel to the hive walls, and once one has got
that done, a 3rd stick to attach the bottom ends of the two downward sticks
to keep them (and the comb) planar.

4)  Another good accessory for a TBH is a series of swarm traps in the area.
You'll be glad you did.

Ooops, that's four things.

Also, "Kenyan" Top bar hives were actually invented by a pair of Canadians.
I guess they had never been to Africa, as they assumed that complex
woodworking with tight tolerances for bee space was beyond the skills of
Africans, which is patently ridiculous to anyone who has actually been to
Africa, where one is approached by someone selling wonderful hand-crafted
wood carvings roughly every 13 seconds.

While the African bees tended towards smaller tree cavities, and smaller
colonies, and likely considered a hollow log hung horizontally in a tree to
be an optimal home, and the TBH was an attempt to move "a log" one step
closer to a manageable movable-comb hive, these colonies  never grew to the
amazing (to the African beekeepers) sizes of the first of the swarms put
into Langstroth hives distributed by Honeycare Africa  (
http://honeycareafrica.com )

Here's an interview, where the TBH is clearly defined as what it was - a
mistake for Africa, from which they are only now starting to recover.  They
can now produce honey in quantity and of quality for export sales, which
means a consistent cash income among people who have few other sources of
cash, most of their crops being "local barter quality" only:

http://tinyurl.com/os8vmkn

And cash allows shoes, school, books, and lamp oil or a solar-charged light.
This pushes the next generation into the educated middle class in one leap.
An opportunity on a scale with winning the lottery, and for the price of
lumber cut on a table saw.  Amazingly to some, they do have table saws in
Africa.  Also lumber.

What Honeycare does is provide the hives, and allows them to be paid for
over time with honey.  This means that a percentage of or all the crop is
sold back to Honeycare and the cash payments get larger when the hive is
paid off.  The beekeeper can still sell or barter his crop locally, but the
export price tends to be a better price.

That's like seven things, so I'll stop.  
But I like what those Honeycare guys do, and I vote with my checkbook.

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