Making an experimental  horizontal TBH.

I made my first one out of recycled pallet wood in 1998 so it cost me nothing. It was falling apart last year so I built another to replace it and re-made the first, ironing wax into the wood to shed water. We have had BIG floods yesterday so I went to check hives today. My TBHs are fine, being on stands but, in shared ariaries I saw one hive upside down and another washed off its stand and sitting upright against the fence six feet away with bees flying from a roof vent.

In the USA your pallet sizes and top bar lengths are probably different so you'll have to plan adjustments but,  for me, using 17" top bars, I set the angle on the saw at 10 degrees and pared each plank except those the bars would sit on. There being 9 planks about 3" wide, this added up to 180 degrees, a half circle. My original top bars were just sawn to the right length and width and worked fine, but sometimes it's difficult to avoid squashing bees so gradually I'm replacing them with bars that have bevelled undersides which is slightly better. 

At first I used starter strips, but nowadays I just go down the underside of each new bar with a soldering iron and a lump of beeswax to draw a thick line to start them off. Sometimes they go off line, but if you notice early enough, the comb is easily persuaded bach to the straight and narrow and there it stays.   

You don't need an extractor. Just slice off the suitable combs, leaving a quarter inch 'footprint' to guide them in rebuilding. The prettiest comb is cut out and sold in plastic containers as cut comb and sold at a premium price. The rest is put in a fruit press and squoze to get all the honey you can. The wax, with residual honey is either chucked into homebrew to allow yeast to extract the honey and turn it into something more interesting or else turned into flapjack. Delve into www.chrissladesbeeblog.wordpress.com for the recipe.

Chris

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