Skip to main content

Building Frames

 Yesterday I made two sets of frames from scratch, and I'm feeling very chuffed. 

A few lengths of Structural Pine from bunnys hardware and a table saw.  It's pretty cool ripping down a length of large dimension timber into small pieces that bees need for their frames. 

It really requires that you concentrate really hard,  use exacting measurements and even using dummy pieces to test saw settings. The satisfaction that comes from a tight fit puff two pieces off timber,  is immense. 

The end product will allow me to assemble to deep boxes, to use in my new hives,  for some splits or even swarms.  In the long term it gives me confidence,  that with hard,  smart work I can set up hives fairly cheaply and begin producing honey.  There's nothing better to sharpen the mind than paying a few hundred bucks for a hive when you are lucky to bring in $10 for  a kilo of bottled product. 

If you want to make hives,  talk to an old beek'r of check You Tube.  

To be continued...

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

More Spring Bee Lessons

 Well my bees beat me up these last two weeks. To be fair though  it was mostly my fault. So,  I started with radix hives; two at coastal Merewether and two on my property near Paterson.   Obviously the Merewether hives produced through winter and with a bit of an up-change in the weather they needed space for brood and honey.  This caught me out (Lesson 1: don't procrastinate or aim to do the least amount of work. In other words don't be lazy.)  I then had to rush around buying and assembling frames. Penders Bees reported that from their orders it's a bumper season. But I  really need to not be so unprepared again.   Adding Supers and extracting helped create space,  but I'll be extracting again very soon with my spanking new machine. Unfortunately in hive #4 the Queen spent the winter above the Excluder and it really knocked them about. Removing the Excluder (which was a third full of dead Drones) got them working ok again.  ...

Swarm Cut Out.

Today's principle task was to participate in my first cut out of a wild bee colony. Leading the extraction was my bee mentor Warren Bee and his neighbour, also experienced extractor, Dave. Well, the colony was hiding in a wall in an abandoned dairy building. Two things straight up to assault the senses, the smell of rear poo (and dust) and a vast number of dead bees. In a north facing wall below the kitchen sink, these bees head cooked in hot weather. The process was to remove all the internal fittings and linings, remove comb and suck up as many bees as possible. Good comb was saved for honey extraction, old comb was trashed. Sucking up the bees was done using a little vacuum cleaning drawing bees through a filtered hive box especially designed for the job. It took about 3.5 hours. I never got stung, so I liked them all. Hopefully, of those that survive this process, they will have a brighter future than their old buddies. PS. As it happens I went to my mentor's yard ...

Spring Beekeeping. Queen Exluders.

 It looks like Blogger has combined all my blogs,  so reading about bees and bikes ... Anyway! My Merewether bees have ramped up their collective presence these past weeks. There has been a feaux swarm and a bit of aggro. So after a few "emergency" calls from my sister I needed to get to the bottom of it.   Adding Supers is a stock response to the Spring Expansion.  The bees,  like the flowers are growing and being more productive and need space to store nectar.  So steps one and two,  were to add supers and extract honey.  This was for all for hives. But this didn't solve the crowding issue and there was still some major bearding of #2.  So,  I read up on Queen Exluders. Truthfully,  i cannot recall exactly why i twigged to this,  I guess it was just intuition? Once I'd read how some Bee'k's refer to then as Honey Excluders and how Workers are reluctant to pass through them and tend to ashore too much honey in the Brood C...