Hello, my name is Shawn Shoptaw and I am the owner of Polecat Creek Bees. I started beekeeping in 2012. When I started with my first two hives, my initial goal was to be able to collect some honey from my hives each year for personal consumption and to share any extra with family and friends. During this first year of keeping bees, I developed a very deep interest in bees, bee behavior, and hive management.
My son helping me with one of our top bar hives.
During my first couple of years of beekeeping, I used top bar hives. There were various reasons for this but the biggest two were that I felt they would be easier for me to build myself and I felt that it was a more “natural” way of beekeeping.
Two of our earlier top bar hives.
One of our top bar hives.
Although I did have success with top bar hives and enjoyed the learning curve it provided me, as my passion grew for raising bees, I realized that it would be a better fit for us to use a more traditional hive.
We began building Langstroth hives.
With this said, we still use a modified top bar hive in our mating yards. I have built many mini-mating nucs for use with our queen raising and mating. This provides us with a way to mate queens with a smaller amount of resources.