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My “double-decker xylophone” filled up rapidly and I needed more storage for beehive frames, but where?

Pootling about the workshop my gazed fell upon the remains of the bed frames that I’d used to make the afore-mentioned xylophone — the round metal tubes that spanned the two sides of the frame to support the mattress. A swift walk up to the bee shed and brilliant! They were just the right length!

I drilled holes in two battens to take the ends of the tubes and screwed them inside the roof to allow frames to hang from them via the lugs.

The tubes are a little further apart than the outside measurement of the sidebars, enabling frames to be placed offset with the the self-spacing part of the frames overlapping and the top bars touching so I can fit more in. The measurement wouldn’t neatly fit into the length of the shed, so the middle two tubes are closer together and the frame sit inside slightly diagonally, just to use all the available space.

The hives have already moved from the old apiary to the new one, so it was time to move the shed and fix the damage done by recent storms.

The pre-fab shed came apart fairly easily, but first I needed a new floor to sit it on as the old 9mm OSB floor was seriously past it. I made a new floor from 3″x2″ timbers and 1″ thick boards that I pulled up tight to each other with some clamps before screwing down. I also made the new floor somewhat larger than the original shed — about 8’x10′ whereas the original shed was 8’x6′. This allowed me to extend the shed to 8’x7′ and (since I had to replace the roof, too), some fiddling about gave a covered sort of “verandah” area for equipment storage.

I wasn’t about to put rubbish felt back on my new roof, so I used EPDM instead, which still needs cutting to size and fixing down at the edges.