At last! I finally finished rebuilding my last roof today (for the moment, at least). Oddly the last one had an aluminium sheet roof covering rather than the more common rusty galvanised steel. This whole process has taken far longer than I expected, but other than the roof inners and covers which I managed to re-use in every case, I have been machining all the parts down from whatever timber I had lying about. It’s a relief to have it done.
There are quite a few candidates for the next project including a new solar wax melter (which looks to be a highly unnecessary bit of kit right now), more crownboards, more fat dummies and probably some other things I’ve forgotten about, but on the grounds that it shifts more stuff that’s taking up lots of space out of the workshop, I may deal with a few brood boxes first.
One box is one of the first I bought when I started beekeeping, made from pine and has seen better days, but isn’t too far gone. Two others are from my “What am I going to do with this?” pile. They’re (I assume) home-made boxes with only ½” thick walls and side rails that, rather than being morticed through the adjoining walls, just butt up to them and are screwed through from the other side (using brass screws, no less) into the end grain of the rail. I reckon all of these could be restored to a standard that I’d consider acceptable for a bait hive without too much work, thereby freeing up some other boxes that I’m currently using for bait hives that I could put to use elsewhere. I might paint them too, to make them easily identifiable as “bait hive only” boxes.