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Top-bar beehive design

Here’s a Google Sketchup design for a simple top-bar beehive.

Some pics:


Notes:

Only 2 measurements really matter in the design of a top-bar beehive: the angle of the side panels (70 degrees) & the width of the top bars 35mm. They both pertain to bee behavior and this design has them both optimized. From what I gather, other measures are quite forgiving.

This design is simple & well researched, I do not know yet how it will fare in practice, more to come on that.

Material:

All you’ll need as far as wood is concerned is a couple of 2x12x16 and a 3/4″ sheet of plywood:

Lastly, all units are in millimeters but based on standard lumber sizes available at the hardware store.

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Chicken cam

As part of my CCTV installation at home, a cam is placed in the chicken coop. This has very little direct purpose although it is fun to watch chicken behaviors with no humans around. And I guess it is nice to check if we have eggs or if everything is all right.

Really, this is an experiment towards what our future farm will be like. We’d like for people to be able to watch how their food is grown. Maybe even interact remotely with the animals.

It’s a little slow due to my 3Mbps connection and the proxying but have fun with it:

The chicken cam has been disabled as we get ready to move to a new state.

A year a and half after our big jump, it has been re-enabled 🙂