Building a Unique Pollination Operation

It was the craziest of times. It was the most exhausting of times. I was trying to hold back the swarming power of 200 top-bar hives, each having only the comb space equivalent to about a deep and a shallow super. These top-bar hives were only two feet long. Why have such a small (short) hive size? Normally top-bar hives are twice as long for honey production (see Figures 1 and 2).
In the early 1990s, I was in Raleigh, North Carolina managing these 200 colonies. They were my extremely mobile pollination colonies, specialized mostly for commercial crops of cucumbers, melons, squash, and pumpkins. With the entrances in one end of the hive (the front), I removed the rear two feet of the hive that normally held surplus honey. As a pollination unit, the colony does not need all that honey weight. Honey is heavy. I did not want to move it. Moving 200 hives, hand-loading them and working alone, I needed a hive easier to pick up and carry. With just a small pickup truck and a little trailer, I needed a lighter hive too, especially after a few days of lifting hives when tiredness and fatigue set in, increasing the chances of accidents. It usually took a week to maybe 10 days to move the hives to cucumber contracts on farms about an hour away from the home apiaries (see Figures 3 and 4).
The size and shape of a two-foot-long top-bar hive, particularly the inward sloping walls, let me lift the hive easier than a straight-sided hive. With my 125 frame hives that I had in the 1970s, I usually hurt my back lifting them, working alone. A two-foot-long top-bar hive (of my comb dimensions) can attain a maximum weight of around 110 lbs. If the average spring weight of a two-foot hive was 80 lbs., I expected to move eight tons of hives (200 * 80 lbs. * 1 ton / 2000 lbs. = 8 tons). For reference, the minimum total hive weight for a two-foot top-bar hive to winter …