Renewing Brood Boxes

At this years Beverley Beekeepers Auction I picked up an unprecedented 8 Commercial Brood Boxes. After sterilising them it was time to check the joints and add cleats to the sides giving me better handles to move a heavy box with than the rebate handle which is a standard part of the Commercial specification.

Finger Joints and screws, Rabbet Joints with screws and possibly glue

The boxes had been made in a variety of styles, some had finger joints reinforced with screws, some had what I think are called rabbet joints which seemed to be glued and screwed and a few had the sort of large finger joint type things I use because cutting all those small fingers is hard work. Of the ten boxes only one had lose corners. It was one with large tab finger type joints and no screws.
 

Bracing corners

After a few minutes with a tee square to hold the corner straight, a drill for pilot holes and a clicky screw driver I put 4 2" wood screws into each corner making it far more solid. The other boxes were all very solid. Not sure how old thy were but some smelled of tar when I was sterilising them so I'd guess they've seen a few years use and being well made I'm sure they'll see a few more years use yet. They all had a little rectangle of wood ground away which I think must've been a brand from a previous owner.

Four of the boxes had rebate handles the rest had handles attached to the outside by now rather rusty nails. Using a clawhammer and a pry bar I removed the old handles and replaced them with longer cleats of tanalised wood. You wouldn't use tanalised wood for hive bodies but stick to the outside of the box I suspect they'll be fine and will live a little longer than untreated wood.

Wooden Cleat, glued and screwed

You only really need handles on two opposing sides of the box, but i prefer to put them on all four sides to give me options when I'm moving hives. I actually only put new cleats on six of the ten boxes. Hopefully I've got more than I need and four should be surplus. Once done I painted them all. I used an uneven mix of green, black and brown shed & fence paint to give them an old and worn look as an anti theft strategy and only treated the outer sides.

Empty Brood Boxes make an excellent advent re playground for cats.

Hamilton Converter

Been a while since I've posted about my beekeepery wood butchering efforts. Back in April last year I bought a colony of bees at the Beverley Beekeepers' Association Auction. They came in a National Hive and I've since moved the bees onto Commercial frames which are larger. The floor and roof the hive came with I can use with Commercial boxes but the Brood Box I don't have a use for as it is. However it can be altered to take 8 Commercial frames using a device called a Hamilton Converter. I don't know anything about Mr or Mrs Hamilton but the Converter sits on top of the National Brood Box raising it's height by 5 cm with a rebate for frame lugs alongside the box's thinner walls making a box with enough room for 8 Commercial Frames.

One National Brood Box minus frame runners.

Plans for a Hamilton Converter seem to be strangely absent from the Internet, however a few beekeeping suppliers make them so after looking at a couple of pictures online and checking National and Commercial Brood Box measurements I was able to knockout a rough plan for one. I was on my phone at the time and used Google Keep to rough it out. Never used Google Keep before, it's a note making app that handles a variety of media and includes a drawing faciltiy which I'll be using again.

My rough plan for a Hamilton Converter

The sides that fit in the rebates on the National could be made up using separate pieces but I decided to make them from one piece each. I initially made all the sides 460mm long then later trimmed the thinner sides down and cut rebates in the wider sides so I could make rabbet joints.

Cutting rebates

All four side pieces needed a rebate cutting along the length, the thick sides needed one at the bottom alonwing them to slot into the rebates already in the brood box, and the thinner sides needed rebates at the top to accommodate the frame lugs and runners. I used the tablesaw to cut the rebates the whole length of two pieces of wood. Once cut I then checked the outside edges of box thick and thin sides lined up. There'd be no point proceeding if they didn't.

They line up ok. Little victory.
Although that upside down 9 should be an 11.

That done the corners of the bottom of the wide sides needed trimming to fit into the National as the rebates stop at the outside edges. Hard to follow? I thought so.

Cutting corners

Between steps I kept checking things fitted together and lined up. I wouldn't like to say if it was due to my careful design, craftsmanship or blind luck but everything did.

Test fit.

With the wide sides in place I then trimmed down the thinner edges so they would overlap the wide ones by 20mm at either end, more or less. I used the sides to mark where to cut the rebates for them to fit into so it didn't matter too much if they weren't exactly the length I was aiming at. I also labelled each corner with a letter from A to D to ensure I was using the sides in the rebates I'd measured for them. It gets a little confusing and it's very easy to cut off the wrong part of the wood. I like to mark the offcuts with a big X to make that a little less likely.

Marking up rebates for the joints.

Finally I had all four pieces cut to size. With all the rebates and lugs the wide edges took a total of ten cuts each not including cutting the length.

I've made a flat pack.

All the wood cut to size I then used wood glue and screws to assemble it using the National Box and a huge wood clamp to keep it all in place. For the screws I drilled guide holes with counter sunk heads and lubricated the screws by putting wood glue in the threads. I trimmed some smaller pieces from offcuts and glued them into the ends of the rebates to tidy things up a bit. There's 3 screws per corner which along with the glue is probably overkill.

We're not finished yet.

With the wooden parts assembled it was time to add some metal runners. These protect the edge of the box and by reducing the amount of surface the frame lugs are resting on make it far easier to manage heavy frames when the box is in use. The runners are made to go in a regular size box not a weird cut down hybrid thing like this so I needed to trim them. Rather than dig out a tape measure I just held the runner to the Converter and marked in pen where to cut then lopped the end off with a hacksaw. I then used the shorter runner to mark where to cut the other one.

Metal Tin Bucket, as seen in the July 2016 edition. Wow.

After trimming both runners had lost a nail hole. To replace those I just used some radio pliers to hold a nail in place whilst I knocked it through the runner with a hammer then pulled the bent nails out for recycling. I could've probably used a drill but this was quicker and less messy with no metal filings.

Making new nail holes.

That done I nailed the new shorter runners in place. The radio pliers came in useful for that too as the nails were too short to hold and I didn't fancy banging my fingers on a cold January evening..

Runner in place.

Finally with the woodwork and metal work done it was time to throw on a coat of paint. I've had some ideas about colour coding hive parts to make them more recognisable at a glance and decided to make this a different colour to all the other brood boxes as it's only going to hold 8 frames instead of 11. Mixing a little reddy brown, green and black I wound up with a nice choclate brown colour which I now think would look good on all my brood boxes ah well..

Lower left? Yes, I did knock the paint over.

It was about 3 degrees Celcius outside and my Shed & Fence paint says not to apply it below 10 so I decided to do the painting indoors. I nipped out and bought a newspaper for the occasion and used it to line a big black plastic tray to contain any spillages. This turned out to be a great plan because at one point I did manage to knock over the yoghurt pot I was using as a paint caddy. Oops.

One National Brood Box converted to an 8 frame Commercial Brood Box.

I decided to give the old National Brood Box a lick of paint too, to give it some protection from the elements. With the box finally finished it's gone to wait in the shed till it's needed again. Ideally you should have two brood boxes for each colony you intend to keep so you can artificially swarm them, at the moment I have eight colonies and four spare brood boxes although I also have a few Nucs I can use to split colonies into.

Yellow Bees, Smoker Spiders and Others

On a recent hive inspection I was surprised to see a round yellow dot moving about on a frame of bees. Normally a round yellow dot is a Queen Bee marking to show she was born in a year ending in a 2 or a 7. Blowing on the comb to separate the bees a bit it tuned out to be a worker.

Yellow marked worker?

I initially wondered if someone was doing some sort of test to see where bees were coming from and going to but if that was the case I should've seen more marked bees. I reached out and touched the bee and as the bee moved from under my thinly gloved finger the mark rubbed off. It was pollen. I found another one looking the same in another hive too.

And another yellow dot

Wasps have started making an appearance round the hives and I've even spotted a couple fighting with bees. Not seen many yet but depending how their numbers are this Summer I may put out a trap. I filmed one butchering a dead bee . I've filmed this before but this is a clearer video -better camera phone, less obstacles, better lighting, friendlier wasp and so on.

Wasp butchering a dead bee

As well as prodding pollen covered bees and annoying wasps with my phone I've made yet another brood box, finishing off the floorboards I was given last year -made three brood boxes, two nucs and a roof with them which I think is pretty good going.

Another Commercial Brood Box ready for painting.

I've also been observing urban wildlife in the garden and apiary and taking a few photographs. Recently upgraded my phone to an HTC 10, the camera is excellent -getting the bees to stand still is a little tricky though.

Spider on my Smoker. D-8

Buff Tailed Bumble Bee (Bombus terrestris) I think

A male Red-tailed bumblebee (Bombus lapidarius)

Honey Bee collecting Nectar and covered in Pollen

Drone Fly (Eristalis tenax), a sort of over muscled hover fly

Common Frog (Rana temporaria)
One of the cats keeps releasing these into the house.

Another two brood boxes

Yet more woodwork in this entry, I might rename the blog Shoddy Carpentry and Me. I recently made some Horseley Boards for swarm control but on their own they're not much use, you also need a spare brood box and a full compliment of frames to go with each. So it was buy more brood boxes or build them myself. As usual I opted to make them myself.

Cutting glued floorboards the hive side size

Last year I was given a load of floorboards which I glued and cut to get the right size for brood box sides. I was cutting 16 sides and didn't feel like doing it by hand so I used the the circular saw that normally lives in the tablesaw housing for that.

16 hive Commecial Hive side sized bits of wood.

I used a few of the side to make up a couple of Nucs earlier. For the joints I just used screws and wood glue. Brood boxes can end up bearing a lot of weight though so I needed to make the joints a bit more robust. Dovetail joints or finger joints are the way forwards. Ideally this could be done with a router and a template but I tried that and just found it confusing so I went back to hand tools. I decided to cut two fingers per side then use glue and screws.

Cutting corners whilst cutting joints.

Previously I've cut the joints one board at a time using pencil marks, whilst my cuts have improved with time there's room for improvement. This time I decided to cut both sides of the corner joint together using a thin saw blade. Clamping two boards at a time onto the workbench and marking the joints I made what would be the horizontal cuts by holding a hacksaw vertically. I marked the edges on the joints A,B, C and D on each box because as I was guaging the cut positions by eye instead of measuring them so each joint would be unique.

More cutting..

The boards were then seperated for the other cuts which I made with the same saw for the outer cuts and a coping saw for the inner ones. I broke a few coping saw blades along the way which wasn't hugely surprising bearing in mind they cost me the princely sum of 19p each.

Test fitting. Looks ok to me.

The floorboard edges have a rebate on the top sides, I used a rabbit/rebate plane to cut off the inner side of the rebate to create a shelf for the frame lugs to sit on. Using a lot of glue on all the mating edges and some long wood screws with predrilled holes I stuck and screwed the sides together. This is normally a real pain unless you have a large collection of big wood clamps but I borrowed another set of hands which made made it a doddle. I added some metal runners saved from the Easipet Supers and gave them a coat of red Shed & Fence Paint. I paint most of my stuff green but these floorboards are quite soft wood and I doubt they'ed stand up well to Winter. Differentiating them with red paint will remind me to swap them out.

Thanks to the existing groove the rebate was too wide.

After filling the boxes with frames I found the rebate for the frame lugs were too wide so the frames could slide too far to one side and fall into the box. I fixed that by gluing and pinning a thin bit of wood into each. Thanks to the free floorboards these brood boxes only cost me a few screws, a couple of batons, a little glue and some paint I already had lying around.

Two more finished brood boxes

More Boxes..

To manage swarming beekeepers need to have enough brood boxes for twice as many hives as they have. After starting with two brood boxes picked up on eBay I later made two more giving me enough for both colonies. I later moved the swarm I'd collected in July last year into one of the brood boxes giving me three full size colonies, meaning I now needed 6 brood boxes. A commercial brood box costs £40-£50 apiece and I didn't have quite that  much change down the side of the sofa so I decided to make my own again.

It was a lot of hard work last time using a couple of handsaws, a plane and a hive stand stabilised with breeze blocks as a work surface. This time I figured with a workbench available things should be a lot easier. A table saw would probably help too but they're a bit pricey. I recently got a couple of Argos vouchers for making a load of money suggestions at work - things like print on both sides of the paper, yeah, not exactly rocket science is it. There wasn't enough for a table saw but there was enough to cover the cheapest circular saw in the shop and a bit of hardware. So armed with a Challenge 160mm Circular Saw, some screws, a couple of clamps and some wood I made a saw top to go on the workbench.

Contains small parts, young children may require some supervision.

It's a pretty easy thing to make really, and there's plenty of articles on the Internet telling you how to turn a perfectly safe circular saw into a far from safe tablesaw if you feel the urge. I made mine so that the cut depth can be altered by turning a couple of screws. The gate is just a straight piece of wood held in place by G-clamps. Underneath is some bracing to hold the saw in place, stop the tabletop from warping and to secure it within the workbench. The top itself is a piece of MDF glued to some hardboard that spend a year under the chickens. Using the saw I routed channels for a crosscut sledge but I've not got around to making that yet. One thing to remember with this is when positioning the gate it needs to be done relative to the blade rather than the table edge just in case the blade is a couple of degrees out. At the moment it has the on switch cable tied in place so when it's plugged in it keeps going. At some point I may add a foot operated deadman's switch in a nod towards safety. BTW if this inspires you to make one and you lose a finger or five I take no responsibility -just because some random posts something on the internet doesn't mean you should follow.

Looks a bit Flintstones

As before making the sides of the brood box required joining two pieces of wood together. Previously I'd used a plane to cut the rebates where the pieces would overlap to give me sides the right height but with the new toy it was just a matter of making two cuts on each piece. If you're trying this at home remember to use push sticks - you don't want your fingers near that spinning blade. I'd originally attached a splitter to the table top, that's a piece of metal that goes behind the blade to stop cut wood trying to close around the blade. It didn't work though so I removed it. This meant that the wooden offcuts were occasionally caught by the blade and hurled across the garden. Unexpected and impressive, but a little inconvenient.

I made one brood box using wood from my local B&Q and the other using wood from my local woodshop. Pros and cons are at B&Q when the label says 22mm it means 22mm but it costs more and the wood and is warped whereas the independent woodshop uses those 'nominal' measurements were 25mm means 22mm but the wood is flat and cheaper. So obviously it's worth grabbing a tape measure and trying a smaller supplier.

It's Hip to be Square.

I picked up enough wood and tanalised screws to make one broodbox for just under £12 from the woodshop. The rebate for the frame lugs I made using the plane -I could've done them faster with the saw but truth is I forgot about them till after I'd lugged the saw back inside and I didn't feel like hauling it out again.

Commercial frames are meant to have rebated had holds on two sides. This means they can be stacked together which is useful for commercial operations who need to move large numbers of hives about on flatbeds. I'm unlikely to ever need that facility so I just attach my handholds on the outside of the boxes, I also add a couple of smaller handholds to the other two sides to making the boxes easier to manoeuvre. They need to bear a lot of weight so need to be attached very securely.

Think I'm getting better at those corner jointy bits.

Then it was just a case of knocking together some deep commercial frames and the boxes were good to go.

A Foray Into Carpentry

Something every bee keeper needs, other than a bucketful of stinging insects, is spare stuff. You need spare supers for the honey season and you need spare brood boxes for various swarm manipulations as well as housing more bees if you expand. Thanks to the auctions, eBay and Fragile Planet I have 6 supers and doubt I'll need more for a long time, however I don't have any spare brood boxes and as I use Commercial ones which are (currently) less popular than the Modified Nationals most of the nation favours there's less places to buy the things from and they're not cheap.

So I figured I'd make my own. My woodworking skills are very limited, I can more or less operate a hammer and a saw, but that's prettymuch it. A brood box is basically a box with the floor missing, so how hard can it be? I did two terms of woodwork at Driffield School, during that time they taught us bugger all. Well that's not quite true, they taught us how nails work, what glue does and that cellulose sealer smells funny. I'm pretty sure I already knew the first two and I've yet to find a use for knowing the third.

The first thing I needed were some hive plans. For the princely sum of £1.70 I was sent an A4 sheet of card printed on both sides. It might sound a bit steep for a piece of card printed on both sides but the fact is it should save a half decent carpenter a lot of money. You know what they say: give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day, teach him to make his own beehives and he can eat fish every day until he loses a thumb in a carpentry accident. Anyway if you want to make one yourself here's my own one sentence commercial brood box plans: Using 22mm thick wood make a box with no bottom measuring 465x465x270mm on the outside, cut a 10x11mm rebate along the inside top edges of two parallel sides. That's it.

The sides are meant to be joined by mortise and tennon joints. Mortise and tennon joints seem very useful things to know how to make. Unfortunately I didn't have a clue how to make them -still not sure which is the mortise and which is the tennon (or is it tenon?). Youtube to the rescue! In 4 minutes 50 seconds this guy taught me more than two terms of woodwork in a rural secondary school ever did. I also needed to know how to cut rebates, that was another mystery solved courtesy of youtube with a little help from wikipedia, turned out I needed something called a rebate plane or rabbeter plane.

Next thing I needed was some tools. I already had a drill, hammers, tape measures, nails, glue, woodfiller, a pencil and one of those right angle measuring things the name of which I forget -T square perhaps? It looks like a capital "L" and I pulled it out of council skip years ago. I needed a work surface, a vice, a tennon saw and a coping saw. However I wasn't buying a workbench and I'm not forking out for a proper vice. After a few minutes on eBay and I'd ordered the cheapest coping and tenon saws the world's marketplace had to offer and two mini vices. The two mini vices were cheaper than one proper vice and didn't need bolting to my worksurface. I also ordered a grandiosely named "Professional Duplex Rebate and Fillister Plane" for the princely sum of £17.50. The plane turned out to be a counterfeit Stanley No.78 Duplex Rabbet Plane -someone's taken a mould of one and is knocking out copies, it even had the Stanley model number embossed on the body so I was able to locate a pdf of the instructions for it. As for a worksurface I figured I'd use one of the hive stands from the auction.

Next up was some wood to make the thing from. Cedar is the best stuff to use, but hey if I wanted the best I wouldn't be banging this thing together myself would I? I've bought ply and recycled pine supers from Fragile Planet and they seem fine so I figure, as long as I treat the outside, pretty much any wood would do. So I went with whatever the local shop had -pine possibly? The sides are meant to be 270mm high and 22mm wide and I couldn't find that anywhere. However it turns out that all the wood in my local wood shop is displayed with incorrect measurements. So a 25mm piece of wood is 22mm thick -I have no idea why, maybe it's some tradesman secret to stop amateurs being able to build anything properly?

My first mistake was using a battery powered jigsaw to cut the lengths of wood to size. A battery powerred jigsw is great if you're in a hurry, but don't mind waiting 8 hours for the bloody thing to charge up. Mine was B&Q's cheapest offering from a few years ago and doesn't have an edge guide making it almost impossibleto cut a straight line with it. Still if you're in a hurry, can wait 8 hours and don't mind a slant to all your cuts then it's the business.

Improvised Workbench

Anyway I needed planks of wood 270mm height but the closest I could get was two pieces adding up to 286mm high, after a little thought I planed in a 16mm rebate in each where they met then used glue and screws across the rebates to join them together. I'd not used a plane before, it turned out to be pretty simple but fairly hard work. I suspect it was really such hard work because my worksurface was about 10" from the ground and wobbled like crazy. There's probably knack to using a plane so it doesn't keep getting clogged up but I didn't figure it out.

Cutting a Mortise or maybe a Tennon

After making the sides the right size I then had to cut the mortise and tenon joins. At this point I discovered that the cheapest tenon saw eBayers could import from Hong Kong was a little dangerous, with a blade given to unexpectedly folding during use. After straightening the thing for the third time I gave up and opted to use an old garden saw I've had kicking about in the shed for the past decade. I also found that the cheapest coping saw in the world evidently came with some the worlds cheapest blades which kept twisting and snapping during use. A trip to Mac's Tool's on Newland Avenue got me a pack of new blades for just under 2 beer tokens.

The box went together fine although the joints weren't too pretty what with the lengths being a little out thanks to the convenience of power tools. Used a bit of glue and some 2" aluminium nails leftover from restoring the original hives to reinforce the joints. Added a little wood filler on the gaps where the joints looked shoddy -as I won't be using the box till next summer at the earliest I figure that any VOCs in the filler or glue will be long gone by then. Treated the outisde with Shed & Fence paint and ended up with a functional brood box, not bad for £9 worth of wood, £1 of screws, and possibly another £1 worth of glue and filler.

First Homemade Brood Box

I figured I could probably do better than that, and could probably use a second spare brood box anyway, so I popped back to the local wood shop and got another two planks of wood, once again ignoring their measurements and measuring them myself. The wood and screws weighed in at £11 this time, not sure why but they've let me have some off cuts for free in the past so I can't complain. This time I decided to cut them manually using my ancient garden saw.

Think I'm starting to the hang of this

Without the wonders of technology I managed to cut the edges nice and straight. Clamped the pieces to the long edge of a hive stand, stabilised it with a couple of breeze blocks and started planing. It took a couple of hours and I finished in darkness but managed to get them all done in an evening.

Second Homemade Commercial Brood Box

After a wait for some decent weather I glued the joints, drilled guide holes through the mortises or maybe the tennons -whichever the bit that sticks out is called anyway, then banged in some galvanised clout nails . I did use a little bit of wood filer here and there but not a lot. I reckon the result is far neater than my first attempt in fact.

Prior to this I'd knocked together some flatpack supers and made up some clearer boards and follower boards, not very challenging stuff. Both brood boxes are functional, bee tight and hold the frames as intended without letting the wind whistle through. I'm pretty certain that with a decent work surface, meaning one that's more than 10" off the ground that doesn't wobble like a weeble in an earthquake, it'd be a far easier job to do and to get more accurate cuts and angles. I could have got a flat packed Commercial Brood box from Thornes delivered for £49.88 (or assembled for £63.51). This little project cost me £40 on tools and about £24 on materials so for two boxes I've saved quite a bit and obviously I still have the tools for later use.