Combs

Comb Spacing seems to be a contentious issue and there is no consensus even among natural beekeepers.

The distance between combs had been described as 1 and ½ inches (38.1 mm) from the center of one top bar to the center of the next one by Jan Dzierzon  who is described as the father of modern apiculture.  So it all started to go downhill from there!

Quite a few Natural Beekeepers swear by small cell bees and they usually have a bar spacing of just 32mm. Whilst others mix narrower bars for the brood and wider bars for the honeycomb.

At the foot of page 41, in "Beekeeping for all"  by Abbe Warre it states that comb spacing centre to centre is 36 mm.

I use the width dimension of 35mm for my Top Bars throughout the hive.

My Top Bars are 43cm long (same length as British National for some interchangeability), and 20mm deep with a saw groove in the centre on the rough bottom edge. I melt a beeswax starter strip into this groove and the bees build onto it like this:-

You can clearly see the 1cm or so deep wax strip which give the bees a starting point to build their comb. The rough cut under surface of the Top Bar will provide a stronger anchorage for the comb than a perfectly smooth edge. You may also notice that the cells are not horizontally parallel to the top bar. A lot of natural cell structure is like this, why I am not sure but the bees want to build it like this so there must be a reason. They couldn't do this with foundation.

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