2012 Beverley Beekeepers' Auction

Yesterday was the annual Beverley Beekeepers auction, in Woodmansey Village Hall. At last year's I got my first colony of bees. Beekeepers really like their auctions. and having never been to one prior to taking an interest in the honey bee this was my fourth. I didn't need anymore bees but I did need another queen excluder pretty soon for my attempts to raise another queen, I'd also seen there was going to be a mead filter up for grabs and I could really use one of those.

Auction Stuff!

The auction started at 12 o'clock with time for viewing for a couple of hours before that. It's a good idea to go along and see what's there and decide what you want to bid on before the auctions starts. But I didn't do that. I'd been out clubbing the night before, was out till late, up till stupidly late and didn't wake up till nearly 12. Oops. Skipping breakfast, elevensies and lunch I charged out into the pouring rain briefly pausing only to pick up some money from an ATM and then hightailed it to Woodmansey. Did I mention the pouring rain BTW? When I say rain we're talking rain of Genesis proportions, I mean chapter six not Phil Collins and Mr Gabriel. If Noah was around he'd've been rushing to load up that Ark with not enough of every animal to leave a viable gene pool. And a pool is prettymuch what the village hall car park was.

The auction had started by the time I got there but it looks like all I'd missed out on bidding on was a shedload of honey jars. There was a bigger turnout than last year's, strange given that last year was a nice warm day and yesterday was cold and wet. I bid on a bag of 67 plastic metal ends. 67 is a nice round number, although you're probably thinking "WTF is a plastic metal end!?" Well a metal end is a metal spacer you attach to the ends of frames in a hive to space them out. Nowadays they're made of plastic but the name has stuck. After that I bought a cup of tea as a late liquid brunch and took a couple of pictures of general auction stuff as this blog has been a little text heavy of late. Looking at the various items I noticed there was a heather honey press standing there. There's been a heather press at every beekeeping auction I've been to. I'm starting to think it's always the same one. It always sells too.

Heather Honey Press, appearing at every auction.

I bid on a box of shallow Manley frame parts and for my fiver came away with 30 top bars, 153 shallow frame sides, 20 national deep sides and 60 bottom bars -not bad for the price of 5 new top bars. Doubt I'll need them all but at just under 2p per item they're there if I ever do. Manley frames aren't self spacing so they're a little out of favour at the moment -of course if by chance you've just bought 67 plastic metal ends that's not going to be a major problem.

£102 worth of new frame parts for a fiver? Don't mind if I do.

The next thing I bid on was a batch of rather aged solid hive floors. I don't plan to use them for my hives but as they were at 4 for £4 I figured they'ed be handy to put things on.Two were made from what looks like floorboard and the other two from plywood. When I scorched them later at home they had a tarry kind of smell so they'ed evidently been treated with some kind of preservative so I suspect they'll be good for a few years. Pretty good deal for a pound a piece even if one had a few woodworm holes in it. Eventually we got to two framed wire Queen Excluders, they were the whole point of my being there so I started bidding. Turned out there were two of us interersted in these and I stopped bidding when they got to about half the price of new ones. Luckily it turned out there were two pairs so I got the second pair. If I'd turned up earlier and had a look at what was available and known there was a second pair I may have bidded differently, well proper prior planning and the other 4 P's spring to mind there.Still I'd got what I needed and rather cheaply too.

Get your loverly solid hive floors pound a piece! Queen Excluders two for nineteen!

After that I finished my cuppa, loaded Facebook on my phone and let the world know I was "Hanging with the cool kids - at Woodmansey Village Hall." They auctioned the live bees in the middle of the day this time but didn't go out into the rain to do it. One advantage of the rain was that anyone buying bees on the day didn't have to wait hours for foraging bees to return to their hives and nucs like we'd had to last year, with the inclement weather none of the bees would be flying. I think they all sold but I was a bit distracted trying to draw a representation of a nun on my phone in a game of Draw Something. When my attention returned to proceedings the next item up was a Baby Burco Boiler. Apparently the auctioneer used to ferment mead in one of these. They're fairly useful things, builders use them to supply gallons of hot water for their constant tea breaks and beekeepers use them to clean frames and stuff. I decided to throw a few bids in as I was never keen on boiling frames in a huge sauce pan of caustic soda perched on my gas cooker. I won the item for £11 which I was fairly pleased with.

Baby Burco

There were a few other bargains, someone got a commercial brood box for the princely sum of £2.50 -better made than the pair I made last summer I might add. Eventually we got to the two mead related items in the auction. The first was an automatic bottle filler. A strange looking thing that was greeting by mumblings of "What's that?" "What is it?" "What's it for?" I didn't really know what it was initially either but the seller had rather wisely printed and laminated a sign saying "Bottle your mead" from which I was able to figure out what it did, didn't really take a Baker Street based Consulting Detective to figure that one out.. Nobody else wanted it so I offered a pound and won. It's not exactly an essential item but for a solitary golden nugget I'll give it a try. After that was the wine filter, helpfully signed "Filter your mead." This was actually a Harris Quickfine kit consisting of two wine filters and two buckets one of which has a hole in the bottom the filter goes in and 6 containers of chemicals which had 'expired' back in 2005 -but lets be honest a tub of perlite is still a tub of perlite even if it's spent 7 years sat in someone's garage, these aren't exactly the most volatile substances known to man after all, half of them were unopened. I paid a fiver for the filter and chemicals. Being almost at the end of the auction I decided to hang about to the finish and got 10 new Jenter punches for my trouble -you use these to make Queen cells so I'm thinking they'll come in handy for my nuc project, made a frame for them today and I'll post about them at a later date. I also picked up a manipulation cloth for another pound. A manipulation cloth is a weighted cloth you put over an open bee hive with a slit in the middle for you to work on one frame at a time, you can acheive the same effect with two tea towels if you like. I'm thinking it'll be useful with Hive1 what with them being a little flighty at the moment.

When I got home I found the Burco Boiler was actually dead as a doornail. Well that's the chance you take with an auction, everything is sold as seen. It'd been PAT tested and evidently wasn't about to electrocute me, although it wasn't about to do anything anything else either. I checked the fuse, that was fine. After a little thought I whipped out my multimeter and a screwdriver took the bottom cover off it and started poking away. There isn't much to these boilers, it's basically a five gallon drum, a switch and a heating element.

Troubleshooting

The multimemeter showed me electricity was reaching the switch but not leaving it. Grabbing some pliers I disconnected the switch and attached the power straight to the heating element, that worked fine. I then removed the switch and noticed the casing was partially open on it. Prizing it all the way open everything looked fine to my electrically uneducated eye. A little more investigation into how it worked and I realised the misaligned casing was stopping two contacts meeting. Popped it back together, turned it on and watched it boil up some water. Nice. It's seen a lot of use and has quite a bit of scale in it so for the time being I'm leaving it tucked out of the way with a 16 litres of supermarket cola in it. I'm thinking the phosphoric acid should eventually dissolve the scale. Interestingly or possibly rather worryingly when I heated up the Cola it smelt exactly like the bathroom surface cleaner I use on the cat's tray. :-s

All in all quite a successful day.

Edit (17/6/2012) the calcification was too much for the cola to deal with so I resorted to some washing machine descaler tablets, five at a time. It's now gleaming inside.