Building our beehives

I took all our beehive equipment into my office today and my colleague Ste and I spent the day building, building, building, then painting, painting, painting.

We built four brood boxes (hold the queen and brood) and five supers (hold the stored honey). The boxes come flat-packed and have to be glued then nailed together. You need slightly better woodworking skills than to make an Ikea wardrobe, but it’s not exactly rocket science.

Once built we painted the hives in two contrasting colours using Cuprinol Garden Shades paint. This is not harmful to the bees as long as it is only on the outside of the hive.

We have a third (spare) hive to paint yet. We also have to make a lot of honeycomb frames. We need 94 of these in all. I’ve only made 11 so far! Once we have the brood frames made we’ll be ready to take delivery of our bees.

The hives have arrived!

Major excitement yesterday: I collected the beehives for my company’s bee project.

We will be having two colonies, so we have taken delivery of three hives, plus a few other spares. We have been advised that you need at least one whole spare hive. Bees have a habit of trying to swarm (which if it happens means you lose bees). To try to prevent this you need spare equipment in order to be able to attempt to manage the colony’s desire to swarm.

Here are a few photos of the equipment as delivered. As you can see, it all needs building. I have made a start this evening by building a handful of brood frames, which are the bottom photos. These are larger frames that are in the area of the hive where the queen lays eggs and the brood is reared.

We have a lot more building to do!

I don’t have a date yet for when the actual bees will arrive. Could be a few weeks yet.