Saturday 25 April 2015

hive assembly

I've spent most of today in that traditional Saturday activity, assembling flat pack furniture, only mine was furniture for bees.  Thinking that I'd be well prepared in advance of the swarming season, back in January I ordered some self assembly brood boxes and beehive roofs from a well known national supplier of beekeeping equipment in their sale.  It took a long time to arrive, even longer than the warning on their website said it might, and then three heavy, slightly battered cardboard boxes turned up.  Since late February they have been sitting in a dark corner of the downstairs sitting room.

Winter is the ideal time to build hives and get ready for the season ahead, or so the theory goes. But in practice assembling the hives never rose to the top of my list of things to do, because it still seemed likes months or at least weeks until I'd need to use them, and there was always something else more urgent to do, and as I struggled with what seemed like an endless series of colds I didn't feel like building beehives, and I hoped the Systems Administrator who is much handier than I am at these things might offer to do it.  Until suddenly the swarming season had started, and it became urgent.  And the SA showed no inclination to spend a day assembling beehives.

The brood box is the bee factory within the hive.  It is the bottom box of the stack, where the queen lives and lays eggs and the workers raise the next generation of bees.  I use commercial brood boxes, which are large enough to accommodate frames sixteen inches wide by ten inches deep.  That's large by beehive standards, the idea being that it gives the queen plenty of room to lay.  It needs to be reasonably solid, and I'd gone for western red cedar, seven eighths of an inch thick.  And to save further on cost I'd gone for seconds.

I'd heard mixed reviews of these seconds.  Some people said they were straightforward to assemble as long as you were prepared to finesse things as you went along, while others said they were infuriating to the point of impossibility.  Both camps turned out to be more or less right.  To give structural strength and rigidity the corners were formed of mortice and tenon joins.  You couldn't have any kind of reinforcing corner vertical piece inside the box because it would get in the way of the frames, so all the strength has to come from the joint itself.  Except that the slots and the sticky out bits (there must be a technical carpentry term for those) on the adjacent side that were supposed to fit into the slots did not exactly align, by a big enough margin for it to matter.  Not just a bit tight so that if you gave it a good couple of whacks with a hammer it would slide home, but extra sixteenths of an inch of wood so that the joint absolutely would not fit together, even when hit quite hard with a lump hammer (using a wooden dolly so as not to damage the joint.  I don't know much about carpentry but I do know that).

I cadged a metal file from the SA's workshop, and made painfully slow progress filing the joints down to enlarge the holes.  After a while the SA saw the extent of the problem and found me a rougher file out of the stash of railway modelling equipment, which speeded things up a bit, but out of the dozen corners I had to assemble (three brood boxes) I reckon only one went together without substantial preparatory work.  So it was conceptually simple, but horribly time consuming, and if you didn't have a rough file to hand you've have been stuffed until you'd gone out and bought one.

I was working at the kitchen table, not having anywhere else, and it seemed like a nice reversal of the traditional domestic roles at lunchtime that I was the one apologising that the kitchen was full of bits of wood and glue and nails, while the SA graciously said that it didn't matter.  The kitchen table is not the ideal working surface, being a bit too bouncy for hammering things together, and I could see why in proper engineering workshops the benches are massively heavy and made out of metal.  Still, I didn't have one of those.

By mid afternoon I'd progressed to the three roofs.  The wooden interiors went together quite easily, being far smaller than the deep boxes, with fewer slots and bits-that-go-into-slots to worry about, but I could not for the life of me see how I was supposed to attach the wooden part to the aluminium roof.  The metal cover is to make the roof weatherproof, and if you were building a hive from scratch and were very cost conscious I don't see why you shouldn't use roofing felt, but if you buy the flat packs then metal comes as standard.  Without any holes drilled in it to put nails through to attach it to the wooden superstructure.  I puzzled about this, and tried knocking holes in it using a nail, but the main thing that happened was that the nail bent.  I went and begged an awl from the SA, who gave it to me with some misgivings, warning me that it was fairly lethal, and I managed to knock two holes through the first metal roof before bending the tip of the awl.  So I had to confess that I'd knackered it (though the SA will be able to sharpen it back to a point) and ask very nicely if the SA could possibly drill some holes through all three pieces of metal in the morning.  I don't understand why they don't come already drilled, when you get everything else down to the drawing pins used to fix the little bits of mesh over the ventilation slots, and maybe I am missing a trick and they are not supposed to be nailed on, but I really can't see how else to keep them in place.  There were no instructions with the roofs.  I did look.

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