Top bar hives look like little coffins on stilts, and unlike Langstroth hives, which use premade wax combs, they are set up so the bees build their own combs. He decided to try building top bar hives, which he’d read about but which weren’t widely available. Reed thought they were clunky, heavy, and not very practical for backyard beekeepers. In the U.S., the most commonly used hive is the boxy Langstroth design, which is low maintenance, and easy to scale up, so it makes sense for commercial beekeepers. He learned how to capture feral swarms (It’s surprisingly easy, he says: Shake ’em into a cardboard box and let them out near your hive.) and started dorking out about different kinds of hives. It got to a point where bee voyeurism wasn’t enough. “I would just sit in a lawn chair and stare at the hive,” he says.
Almost immediately he set up a hive in his parents nearby backyard. “She had communicated that there was a food source and so they showed up,” Matt says. They didn’t think much of it, but the next day there was a swarm of bees outside their front door. The bee ate the honey, got stronger, and flew off. Matt, who says he’s the kind of person who always saves unloveable animals, set out a plate of honey to try to nurse the bee back to health. In 2008, Jill spotted a sick bee on their kitchen windowsill. Reed, a self-proclaimed bee dork, and his wife, Jill, got in to beekeeping and hive building randomly. They’re in line with Portland’s trademark artisanal-everything lifestyle, but - or maybe because of that - beekeepers from New York to Nebraska want them.
Pared down, locally sourced-and-built, and often standing on stilts, they’re designed to mimic how bees build hives naturally. Reed’s hives aren’t the usual stacks of white, blocky drawers, however. Tomorrow morning he’ll move them to one of the hives he keeps in a local community garden. He does this a lot this time of year, when wild swarms start to come out in the spring. This morning, someone tipped him off to a swarm of wild bees and he set off to catch them. Matt Reed is driving through Portland, Ore., with 20,000 bees in the back of his truck.
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