Plastic Barrel Top Bar Hive (honeybee)
The honeybee project on La Gonave is still on-going. I often get inquiries about the status. We are still working on the plans to bring honeybees to La Gonave. The actual dates of having honeybees on La Gonave is Jan of 2016, so in less than 1 year you will see honeybees on La Gonave.
As I mentioned in many blogs, having enough food on the island of La Gonave is very important. It will be a project that will be constantly on-going.
One of the more affordable ways to build hives in Haiti would be to use less wood and use plastic food grade barrels. Honeybees normally build hives in trees and naturally build comb in a particular way. The traditional top bar hive isn't exactly the natural way, but still allows the bees to build their own comb in a similar fashion. Top bar hives are now some of the most expensive hives to purchase.
At Let's Build Gonave, Haiti, we want to make things extremely affordable for future beekeepers on the island. So following suit to many beekeepers in the US, a plastic barrel will do the trick. In fact the barrel will allow one to have two hives at once.
These are 55 gallon barrels so it will take honeybees a very long time to fill out the barrel and sometimes they never will given the size. These barrels are $25 a piece and are extremely sturdy. So literally for $12.50 you can get a top bar hive. Now this doesn't include the top bar frames, but again if you bough the wood to make the frames you would spend at most $5 US. Below is a picture from instructables.com that shows what these plastic barrel top bar hives look like.
As you can see if you cut a barrel in half, you will end up with two barrel hives. These barrels also are used to ship honey to market and overseas as well.
Go Gonave!
As I mentioned in many blogs, having enough food on the island of La Gonave is very important. It will be a project that will be constantly on-going.
One of the more affordable ways to build hives in Haiti would be to use less wood and use plastic food grade barrels. Honeybees normally build hives in trees and naturally build comb in a particular way. The traditional top bar hive isn't exactly the natural way, but still allows the bees to build their own comb in a similar fashion. Top bar hives are now some of the most expensive hives to purchase.
At Let's Build Gonave, Haiti, we want to make things extremely affordable for future beekeepers on the island. So following suit to many beekeepers in the US, a plastic barrel will do the trick. In fact the barrel will allow one to have two hives at once.
These are 55 gallon barrels so it will take honeybees a very long time to fill out the barrel and sometimes they never will given the size. These barrels are $25 a piece and are extremely sturdy. So literally for $12.50 you can get a top bar hive. Now this doesn't include the top bar frames, but again if you bough the wood to make the frames you would spend at most $5 US. Below is a picture from instructables.com that shows what these plastic barrel top bar hives look like.
Go Gonave!
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