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Comment by kaikai | Hacker News Reader

What? I’ve kept bees for years, and this is ridiculous. If you want to make a diy hive that mimics bees natural nests, check out top bar hives. Don’t build them using pallets, which are often treated with insecticides to avoid spreading pests via shipping routes. Only opening your hives to harvest is irresponsible, because in order to care for your bees and avoid spreading diseases to neighboring hives you need to be monitoring for things like varroa mites. This whole article is full of “yikes.”

If you’re interested in keeping bees, search for a local bee guild. They exist all over the place and are usually very welcoming to new folks, with a wealth of actually useful advice and resources.

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> Only opening your hives to harvest is irresponsible.

Inspecting brood comb is also required by law in some places. Here in New Zealand you are required at least one inspection per year of all the brood comb, looking for American foul brood. Disease inspection and treatment is part of good been keeping. Done right it is disruptive but mostly beneficial to the hive. This is easily proven - feral and unmaintained colonies die, usually within the season.

The guide seems to have been written a while back by someone from Argentina. Is it possible that the concerns you raise here are geography/time dependent? E.g. maybe Argentina doesn't have much of a parasite problem, or that when the guide was written a few decades ago pallets weren't treated with insecticides.

(the author seems to have a following and be somewhat respected otherwise, so I'm curious)

My brother is a beekeeper, I help him, that article seems to present a very shoddy method that sounds unhealthy and risky for the bees

Does anybody know whether and how well top bar hives work for Asiatic honey bee (Apia cerana)? Does it require modifications/adjustments versus a design for Apis mellifera? I live in Hong Kong and have long been pondering setting up a hive.

Do people keep A. cerana in Hong Kong in a domesticated fashion? The impression I had was that they were much less attractive than A. mellifera because their hives are much smaller, they swarm more easily, and they produce less honey. Also, since you can purchase strains of A. mellifera that have been bred for good temperament, I wonder how A. cerana compares in that department.

In Japan, A. mellifera is not viable because susumebachi (sparrow wasps -- insanely huge) invade the hive and they can't protect against it. Local honey costs about $20 a lb here as a result.

Wouldn't it be relatively easy to put mesh around the hive with holes that the bees can fit through but the giant wasps can't?

They don't necessarily get in. They hang around the entrance. European honey bees try to attack them one by one and there isn't enough poison to take it down. The asiatic honey bee attacks all at once and actually smothers it. All the action happens outside the hive.

I think there are people who keep A. cerana here, as it seems to be the only native, domesticated honey bee species around here. I have seen lots of bee hive boxes on western side of the Kam Shan Country Park, though they are definitely not top-bar.

My understanding is that A. mellifera is not native to South-East Asia. In fact, there's no recorded observation of A. mellifera in Hong Kong on iNaturalist. So I wouldn't want to import them, lest it results in an ecological catastrophe.

It kills me when I see shipping pallets used as firewood.

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