There are, broadly speaking, three possible situations you may be faced with, once you have built your top bar hive, depending on your particular circumstances and location:
- There are no accessible suppliers of nucleus hives or packages, so your
only likely supply of bees will be swarms – but you don’t know how to
catch or bait a swarm. - You can buy a package of bees, comprising a caged queen and (usually)
two or three pounds of bees in a wire mesh box, but you don’t know how
to introduce them to a TBH. - You can obtain a nucleus hive, usually on five frames, in a suitably-sized
box, but with no obvious means of tranferring them from frames to TBH.
So let’s look at each of these in turn.