I returned this morning to the pile of flat pack self assembly beehive parts, deciding to start with the hive stands. A hive stand, I reasoned, could not be very difficult to construct, and once I'd finished those it would put me in a more positive frame of mind to grapple with the mystery of the floors.
There were no instructions for the stands. Four pieces of wood can still be fairly baffling, and while I could see what to do with three of them, I wasn't so sure what to do with the fourth. The two mirror image sections with tenon joints at one end were clearly the sides, and the third piece with corresponding joints obviously connected them, but what about the big bit cut through at two different diagonals? I went to consult the supplier's website in search of a photo of the finished product, but it looked so little like the bits I had that I began to wonder if they'd sent me the wrong thing. I looked at the picture for the stands for a different type of hive, and suddenly saw how the fourth side worked. It was in fact the fourth plinth, the sloping approach to the entrance door that allowed any tired bee crash landing a few inches short to stagger up to the safety of home, and I was fooled by the optical illusion that made one face of it, the side corresponding to the outer ends of the cross cut diagonals, look impossibly long. Turn it over and suddenly the shorter face matched up to the cross cut ends of the sides. And that, dear reader, is why the manufacturers of budget beehives don't always even try to write instructions.
Nailing the fourth, sloping side on was not so easy as imagining it had been, as it kept sliding out of place, and I thought, not for the first time, that really if God had meant human beings to do carpentry He would have given us more than two hands, but I got there. I'd have liked a little more timber in the back corners as well, since the joints seemed somewhat fragile, but still, once a hive stand is set down you don't move it very often. It's not like the supers that come off at every inspection, or brood boxes that get lugged about with a heavy load of honey, brood and bees inside.
Next I tackled the odd super that I'd added into the order to get me up to the free delivery mark. It's of no practical use as of this moment, because I didn't get any frames for it and I only have a couple of spares, but while I had the glue and all the tools out I though I might as well finish making up everything in one go. The super consisted of two large pieces of wood with slots grooved into each end, and two slightly smaller pieces of wood that clearly went into the slots, which were the sides and the front and back respectively, and four thinner pieces of wood cut to two different complicated cross sections. And some instructions. Whippee. Step three: Slide end boards into grooves, ensuring chamfered edge is towards to and slopes down and out. The top edge must be 7/16" below the top edge of the side panel. So that's clear, then. Fortunately I knew what a finished super ought to look like, and with the aid of a spare frame to check I'd got the internal layout right I managed to assemble it with only one of the smaller pieces initially going in back to front, ignoring the instruction to try and slide anything, and just banging it together with glue from table level upwards, then checking carefully against an existing box that it was square before nailing it together.
That left the floors, which weren't any more obvious than they had been last time, though at least forewarned is forearmed and this time I managed to avoid slashing my knuckles on the edge of the galvanised mesh floor. The Systems Administrator appeared in search of coffee just as I was contemplating the floors, and asked how it was going. I explained how there seemed to be a cross bit missing, unless I was supposed to have the piece of ply with cross piece already nailed on permanently installed, but I didn't want that and anyway the dimensions weren't quite right and I couldn't see how I was supposed to fasten it in. The SA looked at the three parts that with much painful thought I'd managed to put together last time, and agreed that they looked right.
Then I looked in the box, and discovered that while the floor I was trying to build had three pieces of wood plus the wooden floor, two of the other kits had four and the last had five. In other words, I was trying to assemble my first floor with a piece missing. Once we'd sorted that out it suddenly all made sense, I had a rigid square with a level top on which to stand the rest of the beehive, one face cut down to the level of the mesh to leave a gap where the entrance block would go, and grooves beneath the mesh into which I could slide the wooden tray if I wanted a solid floor for purposes of monitoring what varroa and other debris were falling off the bees. That's why I didn't want it there all the time, as part of the point of not having a solid floor is that varroa mites that lose their hold on the bees fall right out of the hive.
It took all morning. I darkly suspect that the SA left me to do it myself on purpose on the grounds that it would be good for me to learn.
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