Chop Wood Carry Water Plant Seeds is a blog about Self-Sufficient Homesteading. How can we live by creating a sustainable bio-diverse world, instead of by consuming and destroying the only one we have? What kind of teaching have you got if you exclude nature?

Tuesday, July 3, 2012

Trågkupa - The Old Horizontal Swedish Bee Hive

Today at Rolf's Apiary I saw an empty green box. It looks like those old boxes one sees beside roads where the sand and tools are kept in.
This was not such a box, but an old Swedish Bee Hive called Trågkupa and it is a Horisontal hive (as the African Top Bar Hive).
There are 4 entrances to choose from. There is space to keep up to 4 nucleus colonies in it and even to overwinter them in this hive
 Low-normal frames. I would replace those with Top Bars big time
 a follower board
 Trågkupa Hive is huge :) or maybe it is Rolf which is small ;)
 In the last photo one can clearly see the space from both sides of the inner hive box. Its like a hive inside a hive :) The space is used to place insolation like hay, wood shaweings, Old duvet covers, raw wool,  ...
It is possible to staple 2 new boxes on top of this one but it becoms very difficult to manage/harvest, sais Rolf. He adds to it "this is the best hive to overwinter the bees in". He keeps no bees in this Trågkupa, rather his choice is Half Langstrot frames in vertical boxes. He is treating his hives with Oxalic Acid ... I think in Autumn once a year.

4 comments:

  1. any chance of getting some plans or details of how to build one?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. No. Now drink the cool-aid and practice beekeeping as instructed, ie like a commercial beekeeper only small scale.

      Delete
    2. No. Now drink the cool-aid and practice beekeeping as instructed, ie like a commercial beekeeper only small scale.

      Delete
  2. thanks for this usefull article, waiting for this article like this again. garden paradise seeds

    ReplyDelete