The Stand Revisisted

Well this year I seem to be have been having a bit of a problem with chalkbrood - well not so much myself as the bees really. I've been swapping out hive floors to remove dead brood, treating the bees and comb with Beevital Mycostop and worker numbers have been rising so they appear to be on top of it now but I'm still seeing a couple of infected brood in hives 2 and 3. Having done some reading up on the topic current thinking suggests it's related to poor ventilation in the hives. All three hives have mesh floors but they're standing on wood supported by large breezeblocks, and in the case of Hive3 they're directly on the blocks. I'd put those blocks in place last summer and I'm starting to suspect that perhaps they're restricting ventilation too much and also they may be keeping detritus falling through the mesh too close to the hives.

Heavy blocks, possibly reducing ventilation under the hives.

So after work on Friday I made a trip to B&Q to get a new hive stand. There's a few different ways to make a hive stand. Some people use a wooden pallet on the ground, some use purpose built wooden platforms, but I favour breezeblocks. In nature honey bees don't nest close to the ground, current stands are generally designed with the beekeeper being able to access the hive in mind. Making a wooden stand would have let me position the hives at the exact height I chose I decided it's take a like too long to do as I was wanting to improve ventilation asap so I went with blocks again. Smaller ones though.

Well that was an exciting shopping trip.

Mine were originally one block from the ground and I put in the wider blocks when I decided to raise the hives a little to make them easier to work. Wider blocks seemed a good idea at the time to make the stand more stable. I'd also only had 2 hives and a nucleus whereas I've currently got 3 hives so I wanted to alter it at some point to support all three on the same platform. There's some wisdom to having each hive on a seperate stands, so vibrations from inspecting one hive don't affect the others, but given the location of my hives this wasn't really feasible.

The supporting structure was designed by a chicken.

Wanting to maximise airflow but also create a stable platform I decided to arrange the hives so there was supporting blocks for each side of each hive. For three hives that meant four columns of blocks. A vertical stack of breezeblocks would probably fall over in a light breeze so I put some treated wood between the blocks and the hives, my theory was that the weight of the hives spread across and pressing down on the blocks would keep things stable as well as increasing ventilation. I'd dipped the cut ends of the wood in end grain preserver to give them a slightly longer life.

The grass needs a mow. Feel free if your passing.

Waiting till the temperature dropped below 10 degrees Celsius and the bees weren't flying, but it was still light enough to see I donned a weightlifting belt, a bee smock, wellies and gloves. First order of the day was to get the hives off the stand. They were heavy. Removing the roofs I used correx sheets over the crownboard feed holes and moved the hives out of the way. Hive3 was just a brood box so that wasn't a problem, Hive2 had a super on it but I managed to move the floor, brood box and super without having to separate them -I was hoping to caused minimum disruption to the bees. Hive1 still had a second brood box from the artificial swarm on top as well as a super. There was no way I was going to move that lot in one go. I moved the Demaree onto the crownboard above Hive2, slapped another crownboard on that then did the same with the super. I put another crownboard on top of the Queen Excluder on the bottom brood box and moved that away too. To reduce my chances of getting stung and possibly dropping a breezeblock on my foot I'd turned the moved hives so the entrances pointed away from me. Well nobody really likes being watched whilst they work.

Done!

When I'd put the blocks in last year I'd had a glamorous assistant to help and there were no supers and one of the hives was actually an empty nuc, but this time with more to move it was to be a solo endeavour. It took about half an hour from start to finish. I used three crownboards to get the spacing right between the columns -you can never have enough crownboards. The finished stand seems pretty stable and as well as allowing more ventilation I can clear away anything building up under the hives easily and look under the hives with my mirror-on-a-stick.

I could make a fort with those!

The old blocks are now sat waiting for a friend with a van to come pick them up so she can use them in her vegetable garden. I'm sure I was an inch shorter after all that lifting. Hopefully this will be the final time I have to remake the hive stand.