We Need Space

This year part of my plan is for my two hives to become two hives and a nucleus, a smaller 5 frame hive, which I hope to house a small colony in so I can have a spare queen for emergencies -emergencies of an "Oh Sandra Bullocks I've squashed the bloody Queen" nature. It's also handy to have a decent spare queen in reserve for just in case one of the colonies becomes aggressive or the incumbent Queen decides to start laying nothing but drones or something.

A commercial nuc is a fairly pricey proposition, Thorne do a rather well made and aesthetically pleasing one for just shy of £150 assembled, a couple of firms do a plywood Commercial Nuc for £42. I wasn't about to pay for Thornes offering and figured I could probably make something a little better for forty beertokens so I popped to the local woodshop and got some planks of 22mm, an offcut of thick ply for the roof and some thinner ones for crownboards and made myself a brand spanking new one. My effort is complete with a mesh floor, sliding correx board for underneath, a crownboard with a closeable hole for feeding, a second insulated crownboard for the winter, a cut down queen excluder and two supers. You don't normally use a queen excluder or supers on a nuc but my thinking was I'll need something to hold the roof up whilst I feed them anyway and it'll give me some room for the colony to expand over the summer. Assuming that goes to plan when I remove the supers from the nuc I'll just unite the excess bees with one of the other colonies, and possibly even reap a little more honey. Good plan Batman.

Here's one I made earlier

Being a relatively tall narrow construction with both supers in place there may be a danger of things toppling over. Wouldn't want that. Bees everywhere. No thanks. So to avoid that I gave the floor two wide feet for stablity and put a couple of screw down sash window locks in place to secure the brood box to it. The supers have right angled brackets on the corners to keep them from moving. I've also got the option of weighting or strapping down the feet if I feel the need. The brood box and one of the supers has mortise tennon joints on all the corners as well as 3" nails and wood glue holding them together, possibly a little overkill there, the other super is just screwed and glued together which in hindsight would've been adequate for the other components really ...ah well this thing is probably bombproof now. Like the hives I've put a little cover over the entrance to direct water away and reduce nighttime light pollution.

When the idea of keeping bees first came to me I'd envisioned having a single beehive merrily buzzing away in the corner of my garden. I cleared a little space, dropped some pavers and breezeblocks in place and happily plonked a beehive on top. Excellent. It soon became apparent that one hive was a risky proposition and I should really have two. Luckily after cutting back a tree there was enough room for two to sit together in the corner. Unfortunately there wasn't room for the nuc to go with the existing hives and placing it anywhere else would've meant garden users (and by garden users I mean me) being in the flightpath of the bees. My only option was to make some space next to the existing hives, this meant moving a bush that was growing there but I thought it'd be fairly easy to prune it, dig it up, move it two feet to the right and replant it.

Move a plant 2 feet to the right? How big a job could that be?

Out comes the trusty machette , chop chop chop, in a couple of minutes I'd pruned the plant to just the right size and shape for it's new location. Then I grabbed the spade and got digging. Unfortunately the shrubby bush thing's trunk was right next to Hive1 and the back was against the wall so I couldn't get to two sides to dig it, also it'd been planted about 12 or 13 years ago and it's root system was pretty extensive. I decided to dig a small trench in front of it then undermine it and pull it out, with minimum fuss and minimum attention from the bees. It didn't go as easily as I'd envisioned -very little ever does. Having dug out two sides and underneath I was unable to move the thing. I waterlogged the soil to soften the ground and tried chopping roots on the other two sides as best I could with the spade. At one point an angry bee came whizzing out at me so I smartly stepped away and decided to give it a few minutes before resuming work. After a green tea I put my gloves back on and promptly flung off the left one. There was a bee in it. I removed the bee and carried on digging till it got dark at which point I decided to call it a night and went out to see Southport and Whizzwood play a charity gig. It was Whizzwood's first gig in ten years and it went a lot smoother than my efforts to move the bloody plant.

Next day when the fuzz of the previous evening had cleared and it'd cooled so the bees weren't flying much I resumed my gardening venture. After another hour of chopping at roots and riving the plant I managed to haul it out using a strap secured round the trunk. Progress, woohoo!

Victory is a muddy garden

Dug a new hole, hitting clay about 18 inches down and got the thing replanted, watered it in and refilled in the hole I'd left in it's original position. No doubt it'll take a while to recover having lost so many roots but I suspect it'll pull through. I'll probably sling it some vermicompost at some point.

I then went to the shed to find my spare paving slabs, there should've been five. They weren't there. I forgot I'd turned most of them into rubble during an afternoon of tameshiwari a couple of summers ago (yes, I do have other interests in case you were wondering), the remainder was what I'd placed under the existing hives. Well I still had half of one left over which was going to be fairly useful as I was needed one and a half pavers to go under the hive anyway. Following a trip to B&Q the next day to get the other one I finally got the nuc in place. It's empty at the moment, and probably will be for a while yet so I blocked the entrance with some kitchen sponge so it didn't turn into a home for slugs and other unwelcomes. With the mesh floor open and crownboard feed hole open too I think it'll be ventilated enough that damp won't present a problem whilst Hive2 builds up numbers and eventually makes me a new queen to go in there. The new paver looks a lot brighter than the rest but that'll fade with time and I doubt the bees will notice.

Poor relation over on the right.

If the hive's hadn't already been in place it would've actually been pretty simple to dig out the plant before paving the area instead of trying to work from one corner. I would suggest anyone planning to install a bee hive in the corner of the garden, allotment or wherever avoid the messing about later and start out budgeting for space for two hives and a nuc. If you don't add a nucleus later you'll just have a little more space to work with.