I was so excited when I learned Chelsea Green was publishing a Top Bar Beekeeping book!  Finally, a book on beekeeping dedicated specifically to us top bar folks!

Well-written, comprehensive, and extremely helpful for the beginner and not-so-beginner alike, Top-Bar Beekeeping by Les Crowder and Heather Harrell is the beekeeping book that hits all the marks for me.  It is a cover-to-cover read, very easy to understand, and if you are interested in natural beekeeping and top bar beekeeping, it’s a necessity.

With thirty years of top bar hive experience, Les Crowder is the man to have written this book.  If you aren’t familiar with top bar beehives, they are simple, easy for the hobby-builder to construct hives which are designed with the honeybee foremost in mind.  In a top bar, the bees are unconstrained by prefabricated comb foundations and able to build their comb to their own specifications, which helps keeps beehives healthier with less human intervention.

With information about how to manage beehives through the seasons, how to raise queens, and a special problem-solving section, I will keep going back to this book for as long as I have bees.

The chapter on comb management alone is worth picking up this book.  Their system of comb spacing to prevent cross-combing is so simple and yet so perfect.

We’re giving away two copies to our readers and all you have to do to get started is click on the link to the publisher below.

Enter to win a copy of Top-Bar Beekeeping, by Les Crowder and Heather Harrell