www.tanstaafl.co.uk

Plans the for current apiary space mean that this year my hives must move. Next to the hives I took over this year (on a bit of land belonging to a neighbouring farmer) we have a scabby patch of ground covered in ivy, nettles and brambles where a few stunted trees grow (thanks to shading by a couple of sycamore trees that have rotting trunks and are generally in a bit of a sorry state). I have decided that this area should be my new apiary. It also has the advantage of only being accessible through a narrow passageway between two walls and is a dead end, so I can put a gate on it and we shouldn’t have any visitors accidentally wandering through without realising what’s there.

The first job was to get rid of a load of the ivy and sycamore. The latter turned out to be a fun job given that some of the trunks were leaning in a direction they could not be allowed to fall. In the end I chainsawed chunks out of the trunk on the “high” side and used a chain lift and ropes to winch the tree to fall in a more suitable direction. The decent timber was chopped up and set aside to dry for next winter’s logs and the rest left in a pile to have a bonfire with. I’ve promised myself that every tree I cut down will be replaced with another, so I’ve ordered a selection of fruit trees and nut trees to arrive next month to plant around the new apiary. I’ve planted about thirty or forty trees since we got here and barely removed a dozen, so I’m well ahead of the game so far.

With the big trees out of the way and the rotting elder and ivy cleared from a large enough area we found a tree that we think is a Bullace, though this late in the year it’s hard to tell from the shrivelled fruit remaining on the tree. I’ll prune it back and keep it for the time being. Now it has some decent light it might well grow better.

The ground slopes slightly, so the next step was to get the digger in and level some ground for a shed to keep my bee suit and bulky stuff such as foundation and frames in. I intend to terrace the entire area once it is clear, having the hives on the lower levels. If necessary I might also make a shelter for storing empty hives in, but that’s a way off yet.

Screwfix were handily offering a fair percentage off some sheds late in 2011 so I bought one and it was duly delivered a couple of weeks later. The lorry driver’s satnav got him lost, and then he got stuck in the field and I had to tow him out with the tractor. I’m not sure I dare order anything else from them 🙂

I’ve now assembled the shed and stood it on blocks to keep it out of the damp, though there’s a bit of flex in the floor. I might have to push some more blocks underneath when the ground dries out a bit.

This first photo shows the levelled area ground with the new shed. The hives in the background are the ones I took over last Autumn and will be moving either to out apiaries or to this new area once it is complete.

This one is the area still to clear. The tree on the far left is a hazel which I intend to coppice. The pollen will be useful to the bees in the early Spring. Immediately in front of it and slightly to the right is the tree I believe to be the bullace.

I have about 90kg of oilseed rape honey that has solidified and obviously before I can turn it into soft-set honey I need to melt it again. Warming cabinets are far from cheap to buy and it’s not exactly hard to build one, so I decided to do just that. It doesn’t even need very many parts. I started with:

• A broken 600mm square chest freezer (that I’ve actually used for storing chicken feed in for a few years, though my original intention was to make it into a smoker)
• A 120mm diameter fan from from a PC power supply that I’d scavenged from a dead PC
• A 60W Danfoss tubular greenhouse heater, about £12 from ebay
• A hot water cylinder thermostat. Not all have a wide enough range, but I found a Siemens model that went down to less than 30C which is sufficient. £11 from Screwfix, I believe
• An aluminium CPU heatsink, also scavenged from a dead PC
• A 6V wall-wart power supply (originally came from a Sony Discman)
• A surface-mounted 13A mains socket
• A length of 3-core electrical cable
• Some scraps of wood

Everything except the thermostat and heater were lying around in the workshop, and I even found another suitable thermostat later on. I know some people use 60 watt light bulbs as a heat source, but we have a lot of trouble with bulbs blowing here, and as light bulbs aren’t really designed to be on for long periods of time in confined spaces it would probably just exacerbate the issue. Incandescent bulbs are becoming harder to get hold of, too.

The heater needed to be mounted horizontally (so the instructions said), so I first fiddled about to see how I could arrange things to fit most containers into the freezer compartment. With the heater across the centre of the compartment floor there was easily room for four 15lb honey buckets, but 30lb buckets would be marginal. With the heater across the back, two 30lb buckets should fit easily, but there’s only room for three 15lb buckets. If I build a platform across about a third of the compartment over the top of the heater however, I’d still get two 30lb buckets or five 15lb buckets in, so I eventually settled on the second arrangement.

I don’t have photos of the construction process, but hopefully the picture at the end should demonstrate what I did clearly enough.

I wanted some protection for the heater so it wouldn’t easily get honey spilt on it (I may also use the cabinet for warming comb), so the first job was to make a cover out of wood (which in fact the heater also mounts onto). I made two holes in the cover, one at each end. Over one hole I fixed the fan so it is drawing air over the heater and blowing it around the cabinet.

I then took the heater power cord and connected it to the thermostat, with another length of cable going from the thermostat to the back of the 13A socket. I ran a longer cable through a small hole in the freezer wall to power the socket and put a plug on the other end. Now the socket is live when it’s plugged in at the wall, but the heater is controlled by the thermostat.

I used wire to fix the thermostat to the flat side of the heatsink and fixed the heatsink to the heater cover just by screwing through the wood until the screws bit into the vanes of the heat sink.

Power to the fan comes from the wall-wart plugged into the 13A socket. It’s a 12V fan running at 6V, so it’s turning more slowly than intended, but that’s no big deal for this.

The final touch was to put a rack on the freezer compartment floor to allow air to circulate beneath the honey containers.

Here’s a photo of the insides, with a few honey jars with crystallised honey for testing. I also put a thermometer inside to see how well the temperature matched the thermostat. It’s not that accurate, to be honest. I think the thermostat reads about 5C high.

If it works well then it’s a design I might well use again on a larger scale. A 1200mm wide chest freezer would quite possibly hold 300lbs of honey, which is more than enough in one hit for the time being.

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.