Did I mention Building Boxes? | Home | Lyon Bee Farm
How handy are you with power tools ? I’m left handed which should give you a hint that I am a little challenged sometimes with our right handed world. Like I said in my first post, we bought 8 boxes, and assembled them, thinking it was a good number of boxes to eventually end up with at the end of our first year of beekeeping. Oh the joy of keeping it simple. Or in our case, not !! Hahaha.
We have found ourselves building boxes most weekends, and I mean full out building trying to perfect our basic assembly line for efficient box making. We have built 8 frame boxes, 5 frame nuc boxes, 3 frame mating nucs, deep ones, medium ones , feeder boxes, and feeding ladders. Oh, tops, bottoms and anything else we needed. We have assembled 100 + frames, and have another 200 to assemble. A word to the wise… it is very cost efficient to make your own wooden ware if you are able to. Most beekeepers will tell you that there is a huge investment in buying equipment. This is true. To buy 2 unassembled hive boxes, a bottom board, top board, feeder box , ladder, and frames for those boxes you will spend easily over $120.00 for each hive. To build them, it will cost your blood, sweat and tears and about 1/4 of that.
I will completely credit my husband with the higher skill level in the building department, as I know I could not have done this all on my own in a timely fashion. We work side by side, and grumble and growl at each other on occasion, like most normal couples challenged with building 20 bee hives in a weekend. Actually, to be honest, it may not be for every couple LOL , remember, you are working from scratch, with limited time, ( because you both have jobs ) and power tools may not be a good mix.
There are really great ways to build hive components, do your research to find plans and methods that you like and will work for what you need. We have found free plans for each section for our hives, with measurements, and how to videos ( I admit, this is especially useful for me ) We sat on the couch, me with a paper and pencil in hand, drawing out how to divide the wood up, cut lines, doing the math to figure out how to get the most from our raw materials. We use just regular good quality pine 1×6, 1×8, 1×12, boards, plywood sheets, and 1×2’s for edging and covers and bottom boards. We have found some short cuts, and used scrap wood to make feeder ladders and we’ve gotten inventive. It’s funny what your solutions are when you need something yesterday, or 5 of something that you need now that you forgot to do lol.
There is a choice and decision to make on some of the things you will make. If you have loads of time, which we have learned is a rare event, make your products well, using the best supplies you can. This will give you a base supply of durable equipment that you will have for a long time. We decided to make simplier designed boxes, for the need of numbers, and in doing so, we made the choice to sacrifice durability of the boxes, knowing that we would have to replace them much sooner. One other thing about these simplier box, is that we decided to sacrifice the durability of them because they were going to be used for short term and not during the winter.
I’m jumping ahead in my story, so I’ll stop here and back up a little in our story and explain in my next few posts how we got to the point where we needed 20 new boxes. Keep on Keep’n Beezy 🙂