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A top-bar hive is a single-story frameless beehive in which the comb hangs from removable bars. Hives that have frames or that use honey chambers in summer but which use similar management principles as regular top-bar hives are sometimes also referred to as top-bar hives. Top-bar hives are rectangular in shape and are typically more than twice as wide as multi-story framed hives commonly found in English speaking countries. Top-bar hives are usually not portable, and allow for beekeeping methods that interfere very little with the colony. Top-bar hives are popular with some beekeepers who believe it is a more natural form of beekeeping, and with beekeepers with little access to materials and machinery to manufacture complex bee hives that require precise measurements, such as those in developing countries. Although the two most well-known styles of long top-bar hives are named "Kenyan" and "Tanzanian", the Kenyan hive was actually developed in Canada, and the so-called Tanzanian hive is not the same as the top-bar hive that was developed in Tanzania. The design of top-bar hives has its origins in the work done in 1965 by Tredwell and Paterson. A tub shaped top-bar hive was trialled in Rhodesia in the 1960s by Penelope Papadopoulou. Long top-bar hives began to appear in the 1960s and were first referred to as "grecian" hives. Similar "long" top-bar hives were also developed in the early 1970s by other authors. The David Hive (1972) was similar to the Kenyan top-bar hive, except that the comb was not cut from the bars at harvest time but reused after extraction. Also in 1972, William Bielby designed a top-bar hive that featured catenary curved comb. Although modern "long" top-bar hives originated in the middle of the twentieth century, initial for use in development projects, a "tub shaped" top-bar hive has been in use for centuries in some regions such as Greece. An example of the tub shaped top-bar hive is the so-called Greek hive that was first described in the 17th century and that have been used in Crete until recently. Tub shaped top-bar hives are usually small enough to be portable, and allow beekeeping methods that involve periodic merging and splitting of colonies. ==Tub shaped top-bar hive== Bee hives that conform to the general description of top-bar hives have existed for many centuries. The earliest known possible mention of a bee hive with removable top-bars is in Giovanni di Bernardo Rucellai's didactic poem ''Le Api'', written in 1539. The travelling pair George Wheler and Jacques Spon witnessed a beekeeping method using woven tub shaped top-bar hives in Greece in 1676. Spon briefly mentioned this in his memoirs, but Wheler gave a detailed description and a drawing of such a hive in his work ''Journey Into Greece'', published in 1682. The dimensions of that hive (including the supposed width of the top-bars and the angle of the hive sides) are variously indicated in modern citations of Wheler's work, but that is pure fiction, since Wheler himself mentioned no dimensions in his book. The beekeeper Zuanne Papadopoli described tub shaped top-bar beekeeping in clay pots that were used prior to 1669 in Crete. He wrote about it in his memoirs in 1696. Although there is evidence that beekeeping was commonly practiced in Crete since the Late Minoan I period (1600-1450 BC), the most common method of beekeeping in that region is using clay or woven long, cylindrical hives. The earliest mention of tub shaped top-bar hives in Crete is by Wheler in 1682. In 1790, Abbot Della Rocca from Syros also wrote about tub shaped top-bar bee hives used in Crete during his time. Thomas Wildman described tub shaped top-bar hives as "skeps that are open at the top" in his ''Treatise on the management of bees'' in 1768. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Horizontal top-bar hive」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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