I have wanted to build beehives for about 4 years. The reason I haven't yet is because neither Mrs Inor nor I are that keen on actually having to care for the bees once the hives are built. I know there are a million reason why we should: bees wax, honey, pollinating the gardens and trees... But at the end of the day, building the hives sounds like a LOT of fun, maintaining the bees afterwards, not so much.
About a week ago a lady down the road from us mentioned that she is interested in getting into beekeeping! She is about 1/2 mile from us so our gardens and trees are definitely within the range that will benefit from her keeping bees. She and her husband are preppers, conservatives, Christians and are becoming good friends. They helped us out a LOT the first couple weeks after I broke my ankle, so I offered to make the hives for her.
Not knowing shit about beehives, other than what I read in a couple books, I decided I should start with making up some sample frames and testing out the different comb foundations to get those sized property. Once I get the exact frame sizes worked out, building the actual boxes, inner and outer covers and the base should be pretty easy. (There seem to be some standards for the sizes but I am not sure how close the folks that sell the foundation material actually stick to the standards.)
So today I whacked together some prototypes for the frames. I made one set for the plastic foundation and one for the wax foundation. I also made one pair of frames for the brood box and one pair for medium honey supers.
The pair for the plastic foundation:
And the pair for the wax:
The plans that I found online were pretty good except the dimensions were a little wonky. If you took the time to add up up the dimensions of all the cut lines, they did not add up to the total size of the part and nowhere in the plans was there any consideration for the width of the saw kerf. Also, some of the parts seemed far too fragile to be prying on them with basically a small pry bar when they are full of honey. So I took some liberties to beef up the sizes a little bit. Once the glue dried, they seem pretty solid - at least solid enough to hold 5-6 pounds of honey.
I gave them off to our neighbor, Julie, this afternoon so she can get some sample foundations and we can see how they fit and make whatever adjustments need to be made before going into production.
I am pretty excited about this project! It is going to be fun!
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