A New Platform

Yesterday i started to put a platform together for keeping my bee's. I've been looking at other peoples bee set ups. The problem i have in my area is fire ants. The soil is mainly sand / Loam so these make nests everywhere. its also very uneven. I was going to keep them on cinder blocks but this looked very messy. I have to keep this looking very nice or i could end up with a lot of complaints.

I've placed the hives south facing for the sun. There is enough room all around to maintain the hives. The construction is fairly easy. its just 4 posts that go down about 3 feet then they are braced either side with treated 2"x4" timber. This gives me a very flat and stable platform for housing 4 hives.

First Installment of wooden ware

Today the first installment of wooden ware arrived

I have ordered2 x Screened Bottom Boards, 2 Deep Hive bodies ( With 10 Frames ), 10 Sheets of 4.9mm Small cell foundations, Some medium gloves and a hive tool.

I ordered all this from Dadant on the 9th ofJanuary which duly arrived today. The deep hives included all the nails you would need for the boxes and the frames. So my step daughter and i started to put each item together. The next week or so will be spent putting the rest of the frames together which whilst not hard is fiddly as everything is fairly light and fragile.

Soak the join so that the glue starts its chemical reaction.

Hold tight and then carefully nail in place with the 2.5 inch Nails

Get a helping hand !

All Complete and ready to be sanded and painted

Everything seems to go together fairly straight forward the boxes have been cut pretty well which has meant they are square. I was using gorilla glue which again seems ok for this application although it does get very sticky. We are planning on having 4 Hives and a spare Nuc come the beginning of April. So far we have built 1 and a half hives.

I Order 2 Nucleus Hives for delivery at the beginning of April.

A Nucleus hive is a hive that is already Established. It has a Queen bee that is already laying eggs in the honey comb frames. The idea is you go to the breeders location swap 5 empty frames for 5 frames full of Bee's, Bee Larva and a Queen.

The cycle of a honey bee ( for workers ) is 21 days till emergence from a the honeycomb and adult maturity. After that they can live anywhere between 6 weeks and 4 months ! depending on the time of year.

Buying a nucleus of bee's means you get a 21 day head start on a Package of bee's

A package of bees is normally 3lbs of bees and 1 queen. you place them in a hive and it can take 2-3 weeks for them to produce the honey comb before the queen even starts to lay eggs and then another 21 days before bee's start to be produced. There are advantages to package bee's in that you have an awful lot of bee's (approx 30,000 - 50,000 bee's )

So hopefully in 4 months i will have 4 Bee hives !

I also ordered ( From Dadant )some screened bottom boards and Deep Hive suppers as well as some other equipment ( Gloves and a hive tool ). Decided to go Small Cell route and will be installing that foundation into the Frames

Start of the New Year

Today i cleaned out the Old Deep body frames of foundation in order to replace them with 3/4" Strips of Small Cell Foundation.

The old frames had been in a hive that was infested with Wax Moth Lava. I boiled the wax in order to save it for fixing the wax strips but ended making a mess everywhere....