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Honeybee Production and Marketing Systems, Constraints - IPMS ...

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4.2.1.2 Top bar hive beekeepingAccording to the survey result, the number of top bar hives owned/house hold has a mean of 0.17hives which is very low <strong>and</strong> needs Bure district Agricultural office to increase the utilization oftop bar hive since it is a bridge to modern hive technology. The productivity from one top barhives has a mean of 10.66kg/hive ranging from 7kg to 18kg/hive which is harvested 1 to 2 timesper year.In the region, Bureau of Agriculture, Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) <strong>and</strong> ResearchCenters introduced top-bar hives since the last decade mostly for demonstration purposes. It hasbeen reported that the intervention of SOS Sahel, Agri. Service Ethiopia as well as Honeyproducers, collectors <strong>and</strong> marketing cooperatives have created a new market opportunity <strong>and</strong> fasttransfer of knowledge on improved beekeeping in general <strong>and</strong> transitional beekeeping inparticular. With practical training, beekeeper farmers are encouraged to construct the hives fromlocally available materials. Locally, top bar hives, in most cases, are made from ‘kerkeha’(Arundinaria alpine) <strong>and</strong> ‘shembeko’ (Arundo donax), eucalyptus species, <strong>and</strong> so forth. Thenthe hives are plastered with fresh cow dung <strong>and</strong> fumigated with smoking materials. Somebeekeepers construct their movable comb hives from lumber <strong>and</strong> others from mud, which is amixture of clay, cow dung <strong>and</strong> ash. Then the top-bars’ grooves or edges are smeared with moltenwax to guide the bees. The only problem for constructing top bar hives by beekeepers is theinability of keeping the specific size of top-bars, which require precise width measurement (32mm). It is recommended to use a bamboo top bar which is easy to maintain the dimension.Figure 2: Top bar hive type <strong>and</strong> its placement43

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