At Gold Star Honeybees we are in the business of building top quality, effective, natural top bar hive kits. We started doing this back in 2008, testing different design features and different materials to make our kits the very best value, and to save new beekeepers from having to make all the same mistakes we made, inventing a top bar hive from scratch. We invest a lot of our time supporting our customers, novice and experienced beekeepers alike, and providing resources that help them keep bees successfully in Gold Star top bar hives.
We post videos on our YouTube channel - which you can subscribe to – where we answer many of the questions we get asked on a regular basis in video. We send out a regular Constant Contact ® email blast, containing lots of relevant information, that you can sign up for. We wrote a how-to book on keeping bees naturally in top bar hives – it’s called The Thinking Beekeeper – A Guide to Natural Beekeeping in Top Bar Hives – which you can buy from Gold Star Honeybees ®, or from Amazon, or from your local bookstore, in fact, you may even be able to find it in your local library! We have an active Facebook page where we post lots of current events and links to interesting stuff, and where you can post stuff too, and we manage a top bar beekeepers group at yahoo.groups.com, where top bar beekeepers can exchange information and even find each other in the real world, to mentor and support each other.
So it’s a little amusing when we get a call from someone who is completely frustrated with the top bar hive that they built, and they beg us to save them from themselves. Don’t get me wrong, we love it that everyone is getting it that bees are important to our food system, and that so many people are clueing in to the fact that without bees, there would be a VERY limited amount of food available, and it’s great that so many people have gotten so interested in and become so passionate about beekeeping.
But surely folks, you realize that I didn’t start this business immediately after tumbling off the back of the turnip truck. We’ve put a lot of our own blood, sweat and tears into learning what it takes to make the best possible top bar hive – into discovering what works and what doesn’t, what features are essential and what features are just fancy bells and whistles, or the result of overthinking the whole thing. We’d like to save you some trouble – and let you stand on our shoulders, taking advantage of the mistakes we made as we learned how to do it well. We like helping people do a good job of providing an environment where bees can thrive!
Bees are not rocket science, but we know that sometimes people do get pretty intent on engineering a hive way beyond the needs of the bees. Sometimes we all sort of “overthink” it when it comes to bees. But there’s a balance to be struck – and we think we’ve hit it with products that are effective, well-made, and affordable. We hope you think so too – and we look forward to being a part of your beekeeping journey. Bzzzzzt!