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I need around twenty feeders for my beehives this year. I’ve messed about with trays full of syrup on top of the crown board up until now, but I really need something a bit better. A few people recommended the Ashforth-style feeder and I discovered that the poly versions have a sloping floor, so I decided to experiment by building a few of my own with different floor and baffle designs. The advantage of the sloping floor is that you don’t have to let the bees out into the main feed volume to clean up the last of the syrup as it should all run towards them no matter which way you put the feeder on unless the hive is way out of level. The potential disadvantage is that, at least when made of timber rather than moulded, the bees may decide to build comb under the higher part of the floor. Time will tell.

The photographs show my first attempt, built entirely from scrap timber I had lying about.

The sides are 120mm high and made from 18mm ply. I used a router to cut the channels for joining the sides together and for fitting the floor and baffles.

The floor is 9mm ply with a long 8mm wide slot cut at one end to allow the bees up into the feeder.

The baffles are 12mm ply. The first is fixed to the walls and floor and has a gap over the top to allow the bees to get over it. The second is fixed to the walls, but has a 3mm gap between it and the floor to allow syrup to flow through without allowing bees out. I also found some scrap perspex from which I will cut a lid to cover the baffles so I can see what the bees are doing whilst I fill the feeder.

The final steps are to paint the feeder to seal it and to dust the wet paint on the baffles with sand to allow the bees a better grip whilst climbing them.

Having worked out one design, I now intend to modify the floor and baffle arrangements and possibly try different timber sizes to see what works best. If I can find a suitable tool for creating plans (that runs on Linux — I don’t do anything else) I’ll try to do that and make them available here.

In those years where we have a proper summer (not since about 2006 now), I put “waste” beeswax and old combs into my solar extractor to melt down the wax. In 2011 we didn’t really get that much decent wax-melting weather though, so I ended the year with about fifty frames of comb I wanted to melt down. Some bee equipment vendors sell steam-powered extractors, but want far more beer tokens than I am prepared to pay. Hunting around the interwebs I found a few ideas and here’s what I ended up with. It uses an old steam wallpaper stripper to make the steam. The “head” of the stripper was removable, so I could use just the heater unit and the flexible hose.

I started with an old “bench” — actually a table that I believe my dad built for putting motorcycle engines on whilst he was working on them. On that I built a “Jenga”-style base of timbers about 50cm long so everything on top would be tilted forward.

I have a number of old solid floors that I no longer use and was willing to sacrifice to the project, so one of those went on next. Where the entrance block would normally go I screwed two blocks of wood to leave a gap about 20mm wide in the middle of that edge of the floor.

On top of the solid floor goes a mesh floor. This one had its entire front edge open for an entrance block, so I closed the entire length with another block of wood. This floor stops rubbish from falling onto the solid floor and blocking up the hole (that the molten wax will eventually run from).

On top of the mesh floor goes the box of frames to be melted down. I was prepared to sacrifice this brood box because it doesn’t have space for frame runners and was in need of some repair work, but actually it doesn’t seem to have come to any harm despite being repeatedly filled with steam.

I needed a “lid”, and a second solid floor did the job. I cut a small hole in the top for feeding the steam in. I can’t recall the exact diameter of the hole, but I believe it’s around 40mm to 50mm.

The end of the wallpaper stripper hose had two lugs to lock it into the head. To allow the same mechanism to work for my melter I cut a small piece of ply to take the hose with some cut-outs for the lugs. The hose can thus be pushed through ply and turned to hold it in place.

There’s the hose “socket” fixed in place. The hole in the floor is large enough that the lugs on the hose won’t foul.

The hose in situ.

Finally, a couple of photos of the extractor in action. To help seal the box so steam can’t escape from the joins I use a couple of ratchet straps to pull it together firmly. I fill up the stripper reservoir and leave it to run for about half an hour, which is usually enough to melt all of the wax from the combs.
Once the wax is melted I allow the box to cool and remove the lid. The frames clean up fairly easily and should be sterile for re-use if necessary (old frames I don’t want get used as kindling for our wood-burner). Even propolis scraps off without too much trouble. Extracted brood frames tend to collapse leaving blackened cocoons on the mesh floor. I remove those and put them on the compost heap.

This autumn I melted down my entire pile of waste wax and old frames, ending up with about 6kg of wax, some of which I’ll probably exchange for foundation and some I’ll make into candles.

The only real negative side of the extractor is that wasps and bees find it irresistable. It’s probably a process that’s best saved for the winter months, or done somewhere well out of the way of other people.