Horsley Boards

I have a couple of Snelgrove Boards for artificial swarming and was looking to make a few more when I came across the Horsley Board. The invention of a guy called Arthur Horsley, it was developed based on the Snelgrove board but for people with less access to their hives, to me his method seems simpler to follow so I decided to make two of these. It's basically a crownboard with a meshed area and an area of queen excluder which can be closed opening a side entrance. You can buy them ready made for about thirty quid a pop or you can make your own less polished version for far less.

Edging the board

Using a drill and a jigsaw I cut a couple of holes in some plywood, one for the meshed section which allows scent from the bees below the board to mingle with the bees above and one for an small area of queen excluder. A rim was added above and below the board but the edge nearest where the section of queen excluder would be had a section cut out which would be used to make a pull out entrance.
 

Making metal doors

A metal door to open and close the queen excluder when the side entrance is opened and closed also needed making. I popped to Bargain Line on Newland Avenue and picked up a baking tray for a couple of quid then used a dremmel to cut out two rectangular sections which I trimmed to shape with tin snips. The queen excluder section was made cut from a plastic excluder I had knocking around. I prefer using framed wire excluders so it hadn't seen much use.

Snip snip

To make runners for the doors I could probably have got away with a few flat head nails or screws but I decided to file a layer of ply from some offcuts instead. I left the back end open so I can remove the door completely for cleaning if the mood takes me.

Checking the fit and testing the action

Once I'd tested the runners I used some panel pins to secure them to the board and attached the edge offcut to each. The entrance bit need a handles so I knocked in a couple of galvanised nails at an angle for that. It's simple but workable.

Pretty much done.

All that was left was to give the edges a little paint to protect them from the weather. I decided to use some black Shed & Fence Paint to make them stand out from the rest of the hive.

Two finished Horsley Boards.

Ideally I'd like to have one of these and a spare brood box per hive so I can artificially swarm every hive at the same time if required. At the moment I have seven full size colonies so I'll probably be making a few more at some point.

A little guidance from the BeeCraft booklet

There's plenty of sites giving instructions on how to use these boards, and they're not all the same. The method on the David Cushman site covers two ways to do the artificial swarm depending upon whether or not you can find the Queen or not and the BeeCraft site details a method that seems a cross between the two. Cushman also details a method of using the Horsley Board to create a Two Queen System.