Just for comparison, the first 2-3 years that my friends and I had top bar hives, we'd spent a total of $40 to get into beekeeping:
-homemade smoker
-homemade veils (this is really, really easy- a smoker is much harder to build well, I'd recommend EBay)
-scrap wood we got on the street and in construction dumpsters (old shelves or 1x or 2x lumber for the top bars, and plywood offcuts for the sides and ends of the hive)
-nails and glue
-a thrift store pot and strainer for 'crush and strain' extraction
-a paint strainer bag for same
-homemade hive tools made by bending some metal (a flat crowbar and some knives works well)

those were literally the only expenses.

We built about 3 hives for that $40, made 3 or 4 veils, and had several gallons of honey a year for our trouble (this is in California where winters were mild, your mileage may vary elsewhere) plus a bunch of useful wax.


To get started in Langstroth hives, you need about $100 a hive for a hive kit, plus an extractor (several hundred), a queen excluder, plus a way to store any unused drawn comb (or else wax moth devastates it), which some people have refrigerators for, plus purchase of foundation, etc, etc. The drawn comb storage problem doesn't exist in TBH beekeeping and TBH may be healthier for bees than keeping the same drawn comb for years on end. There is research showing that reusing old comb creates a heavy virus, fungus spore, and bacteria load that harms brood after a few years of reuse (some beekeepers believe that wax moth and bees are symbiotic, not a parasitic-host relationship, and the point is to have wax moth eat old brood comb over the years while the bees move the brood area to fresh comb as they do in a natural hive unencumbered by queen excluders).

the 'natural cell' foundation movement (bwrangler explains this very well) discovered the key to organic beekeeping, which you can't do with Langstroth foundation (you can do a hybrid TBH-Lang long hive as per Michael Bush's website, or you can do a Langstroth and go foundationless, which is as much work as a TBH but gives you interchangable equipment with other Lang beekeepers)


Lang folks will tell you that you'll get more honey out of a Lang. I have messed iwth them a little and I haven't found that to be the case- I can extract more honey by doing crush and strain than they can extract with a hand-cranked extractor, and it's actually MUCH less of a mess. On the other hand a well-managed Lang can theoretically produce more stored honey because bees don't spend any time on re-creating wax. There's debate about reusing comb for very long- brood comb is the big issue, not honey storage comb, I think. If you're doing good management, I think a hobby Lang and a hobby TBH come out about the same in terms of hassle or effort. you can build a super for a TBH, thus gaining some of the advantages of a Lang.

Ideally, as a hobbyist, I'd have a hybrid Lang with top bars so I could periodically get brood combs from other beekeepers in the area if my queens died or some other issue happened. TBH's are rarely uniform and I wish that we'd just set up a standard so that everyone in the same neighborhood would have interchangable equipment.

There are some issues with using a Lang-TBH hybrid in conventional Lang equipment, mostly because a deep 19" wide Lang comb is heavy and tends to break if not encased in a Lang frame. I think you can address this in temperate climates by using shallow boxes. However, in colder climes depth may matter because of the insulative bvalue of honey stored over brood, etc.

Bees will fly up to 3 miles for pollen - but it shortens their lives (it is believed.)
They will be visiting ALL your neighbors gardens, including the ones who spray with pesticides. (just sayin'.)

Aggressive? Depends what kind of bees you have and how you treat them. Keep them short of pollen/grease patties/water and they're likely to get very offended. Seek out africanized bees and they'll be aggressive. Just get yourself some nice, laid-back locally raised bees from someone who's splitting a hive. You'll do fine and will probably get yourself a mentor at the same time.

Ah, but do it in early spring. July is pretty much too late in the US to start up a new hive and have it winter successfully. Unless maybe you live waaay down south?