Moving up in the World

Beehives are usually kept on some sort of stand. This is to keep the hive out of the damp, make it harder for certain pests to get into the hives, facilitate airflow  below the hives and to allow the beekeeper to work the bees more comfortably. There seems to be a range of different height stands in used to suit different purposes and people, they range from a few centimetres to about four feet in the case of the White house bees.

As I start my third season I decided mine needed to be higher, after all inspecting 2 hives worth of frames means picking up and putting down 22 frames and they can get heavy. My plan was to replace the individual breeze blocks with stacks of four laid on their largest face for stability. However when I got to B&Q I found it worked out cheaper to buy a smaller number of blocks twice the size of the original ones so that's what I did. They're actually Autoclaved Aerated Concrete (AAC) blocks for anyone feeling particularly pedantic today. They're lighter than regular concrete blocks, there's a few other reasons people use them for building but none of them are particularly relevant to my using them here. These were 21.5cm wide and 27.5cm high, nice round figures chosen by the building industry there.

Hives and AAC blocks

Having acquired the AAC blocks I needed to move the hives out of the way. I removed the garden boxes and roofs to lighten the hives, as the season is getting off to a very late start this year the brood boxes were very light anyway. Leaving the crownboards and floors in place, aided and abetted by an extra pair of hands I moved the populated brood boxes onto a wooden hive stand and started arranging the new blocks.

Hive2 sat on top of Hive1

Whilst I was deciding how to arrange the blocks foraging bees were returning and finding their hives weren't where they expected them to be were buzzing about exactly where I was arranging the blocks. Being so large the blocks were stable on their thinner longest side so I popped the hives back in place, replaced the roofs and garden boxes then stepped back to admire our handy work. The blocks stacked this way were 55cm high, plus the wooden beams. At this point I realised they were a few inches too high. Whilst I'd be easily able to inspect the brood boxes once I started adding supers I'd probably run into difficulty.

Too high damnit!

The hives were actually very light to move what with colonies being smalls at present and very little stores so far so I figured I could move them by myself. To avoid a cloud of returning bees forming where I was trying to work again I waited for the temperature to drop so foragers would have returned to the hives before I moved them again. Removing the hives and turning the blocks on their sides dropped the height of the blocks to 43cm, almost the height of a super. Just right. I hope. I'll have to see how it is for a year before I decide.

The right height!

I currently only have 2 hives as the nuc died out whilst Spring was masquerading as Winter. However I plan to create a new nuc colony at some point so shuffling the old blocks and adding a half an AAC block previously liberated from a skip I put the new nuc at the same height as the other two colonies. By this time next year I should have decided if they're the right height or not.

Finished, for a while anyway.