OK the hive is ready, the frames have been taken apart and scorched, boiled and cleaned with flames, harsh chemicals and elbow grease. I'm pretty certain no germs survived that. Next thing is to get some foundation and reassemble the frames. Whilst Googling for information on foundation I came across this table of foundation sizes courtesy of Paynes Bee Farm. Looking at the table and looking at my frames I began to think something wasn't quite right. My frames looked too big, and the shallows were quite blatantly more than 5" deep.
After a lot of head scratching and little measuring I realised that the hive I'd bought wasn't actually the hive I'd thought. I'd believed I'd purchased a national hive with two shallow supers. But I hadn't. What I had was a Commercial brood box and the two supers were actually National brood boxes. Oops. That's a huge hive. Well I hadn't seen a beehive in real life since the introductory course and re reading the advert for the hive as it was advertised it was pretty clear that the seller knew nothing about beekeeping himself so the advert hadn't been too clear. In the immortal words of everyone's favourite jaundiced everyman Homer Simpson "D'oh!"
Still whilst I have 2 National brood boxes and their frames as well as the Commercial boxes and frames having read a lot about brood and a half and double brood boxes I've come to the conclusion that a Commercial brood box is probably the way for me to go. When I get bees they'll be in a National nuc. National frames are smaller than Commercial ones, but seriously cable tying some wood to pad out the frames isn't really rocket science is it. Yes, I'm one of those people who's happy to blaze their own trail ignoring the conventions of the nation.
I decided to bin off the Queen excluder I'd got with the hive as although it was a nice wooden framed one I didn't think I had a hope in hell of sterilising it without melting the plastic grille -not with the resources I had to hand anyway. I also needed a couple of new bits of frames to repalce a few that broke during cleaning as well as the foundation -I also wanted to make up a short frame in the hive to do the sacrificial drone brood varroa control thing, so I decided rather than wait on mail order I'd make a road trip to Thorne to pick up the bits I needed. Postage on anything bee related seems kinda pricey anyway. So off I went to get a plastic queen excluder various bits of Commercial and National frames and foundation for Commercial Deep, Commercial Shallow (for the drones) and National Deep frames.
Thornes shop in Wragby managed to elude my satnav but I found it eventually. It was rather strange actually. It's like a beekeeping supermarket with prettymuch everything in it except customers, and bees. Yep I was the only customer there -well it was a weekday I guess. Anyway I got my gubbins then drove off home to make up the Commercial frames I anticipate needing later.
Incidentally the old comb that I pulled out of the original frames I melted and strained, now I have a half kilo block of beeswax in a plastic bag. I gather I can't let the bees have it in case of disease so at some point I'll hopefully exchange it for foundation.
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