Floored

In response to last Winter's losses which were worse than all my previous years added together I've decided to switch from treating Varroa by trickling oxalic acid solution to vapourising it instead. The main difference for me is that whilst both treatments work best when there is no brood in the hive trickling can only be done once a season whereas the Oxalic Vapour treatment can be repeated. Last Winter was warm enough in November, December and the first half of January for the bees to continue raising brood, this delayed my application of Oxalic Acid solution and also reduced it's efficacy. If I was vapourising I'd've been able to apply it two three times a week apart. My regular open mesh floors would need sealing up to use a vapouriser  which would be a bit awkward so I decided to make new floors to better accommodate a vapouriser.

Rather than reinventing the wheel I looked at a few floor types and decided to make a version of the "Kewl Floor." Terrible name sounds like something from an 80's teen oriented music magazine, possibly it was invented by a chap with an unfortunate name - doubt it though. The Kewl floor is based on the Dartington Hive floor and similar to a Heather Floor.The entrance is a set back vertical 8-9mm wide slot which mice can't get through and the bees can better defend from wasps by having guards on both sides.

There's a few webpages with plans and descriptions of the Kewl Floor, my starting point was a post on The Apiarist's blog with lots of handy pictures and even a cutting list for National Hive size floors, I use Commercial Brood Boxes which are (meant to be) 5mm longer and wider than Nationals and based my floors on wood available from B&Q as, fairly typically, I decided to start work in the late evening and they were still open. As per usual I took a tape measure along as wood is sold using "nominal" measurements which seems to be wood yard speak for "we're shortchanging you."

I found the B&Q's nominal 47x75mm meant 46x72mm, their 22x75mm was 21x70mm and their 25x100mm was actually 21x96mm. So a difference of 1 to 5mm depending on which measurement you're looking at. Whipping out an Android Tablet and firing up the excellent Google Keep I knocked out a quick design based based on three different sizes of wood with a 465 x 465mm footprint. My plan was to make floors that I could treat using a Vapouriser from below the mesh floor.

Google Keep diagram - just add 22mm battens on top

To accommodate a vapouriser the rear wall of the floor which would be below the mesh needed a 14x90mm slot cutting into it. That meant a quick trip out to buy a chisel. I'm pretty sure with a bit more time and patience a semi decent carpenter or trained monkey could've made a nice uniform cut but I was working outside, it was cold dark and snowing so I just did it quickly and tidied up the face with a file.

14x90mm slots to accommodate vapouriser

I decided to build the floors using wood glue and screws. That may be a bit of overkill given the strength of modern wood glues but with a few supers and an artifical swarm on top the hives can be extremely heavy. Marking the outside surfaces with a rough map of where the pieces would go I drilled pilot holes for the screws.

You know the drill

I used a drill with a screwdriver bit and lubricated the screw threads with a little wood glue. Using such long screws turned out to be a complete pain the proverbial. I had problems with screws getting stuck part way in and the drill stripping the heads so I'd have to stop and use huge plumbing pliers to grab the head and slowly remove the things before trying again with a new screw.. eventually I switched to nails. I gather nails have a greater shear strength than screws although screws are better for holding pieces tightly together. Switching to nails with pilot holes and a little wood glue really sped things up.

Stripped screw head. Again.

Clamping the pieces to screw and nail together took a little creativity with the clamps, I gather corner clamps exist but I don't have any. What I ended up doing was attaching the rear piece first then the front pieces and finally clamping the middle vertical piece tight against a 9mm drill bit to get the correct gap size for the slot.  It took a little knocking with a hammer to get the middle piece of wood in place. There is a bit of wriggle room in the 8-9mm slot with really as it's intended to give room or the bees to pass back to back. The important thing is not to leave a gap over 9mm wide otherwise your hive becomes a Winter Mouse House.

9mm drill bit as a spacer

Snow! Fantastic...

With the main structure and the entrances complete the floors needed a mesh section over the main area. I had a couple of mesh squares knocking about from previous projects and ordered another ten from Simon the Beekeeper. Initially I took a mesh square and cut out an area slightly wider than the entrance slot and stapled it in place then put the 22mm battens forming the top edge over it. Cutting a slot in the mesh was a bit of hard work. I later cut a rectangles big enough to cover the hole but small enough to fit inside the battens and stapled them in. I used stainless steel staples to hold the mesh as I don't want condensation to rust them -that and I a load left from re roofing my chicken coop.

Two down, eight to go

I was initially measuring and cutting the battens to fit the floors but decided a faster and more accurate way was just to attach the whole batten butted against an off cut then cut the excess then repeat butted against the previous piece. This saved a lot of time, accommodated tolerances across the pieces and removed of wastage from measuring mistakes ..which I did manage a few of earlier - used them to fuel the chimnea I'd lit to supplement the three pocket warmers I was using as most if this was done across a few freezing February evenings.

Sliding Bottom Boards

The bottom boards were made from thin plywood I'd found someplace. I made thin wooden runners to go underneath the boards making a very close fit and attached a batten under the rear of each board to function as a handle underneath.. I actually only made three of these wooden sliding boards as I only had a little plywood and make the rest from correx. The correx ones are just to use as regular sliding bottom boards for checking varroa drop but the wooden boards should be able to support a hot vapouriser. I'm only going to be able to vapourise one hive at a time anyway so three wooden boards should be okay. You can buy correx sheets but its easy to find free as it's used for signs which often wind up in skips or just fly tipped.

One completed floor with fitted wooden bottom board

I made ten floors in total. I don't really intend to have ten full size colonies in the foreseeable future but it's handy to have a few spares around in case something unexpected happens. I also like to be able to swap out floors for fresh ones after winter to remove any dead bees and detritus and sterilise them.

Art Attack

I gave the finished floors a lick of shed and fence paint on the outer surfaces leaving the inside and pack of the entrance area unpainted. I used some badly mixed brown and black paint to give an uneven coloured finish making the floors look a little less tempting to others and making each one unique which I hope will make it easier for the bees to identify which entrance is their own hive and reduce drift.

10 Finished Floors

I'm quite pleased with the finished floors but it later occured to me they could be improved by having the lower part on the entrance sloping down instead of horizontal. It would mean making an angled cut along the back of the landing board so it fits flush to the back of the alcove and make drilling pilot holes a little tricky but would have two advatages. Firstly rain would run off and secondly anything the bees drop out of the entrance it such as dead brood, bees, wasps, bits of wax, newpaper from unites etc would fall away too.

Bring Out Your Dead!

As winter progresses the bee colonies die back. Those dead bodies can accumulate on the hive floor  reducing the ventilation element of the wire mesh floor and even blocking the exit so living bees can't get out. I don't imagine it's a whole lot of fun living in a house where the floor is covered with rotting corpses and doors jammed shut by more of the dead. Normally the colony will remove dead bees from the colony carrying the dead away and dropping them away from the hive, when it's too cold for flying they can't do that and the tiny corpses accumulate. Last winter seemed happy to hang about and lasted well into spring which caused a few problems for the bees including meaning they were cooped up in the hive longer than expected so there's more dead on the floor than you'd expect in a normal year.

There's probably a few ways you could remove the dead bees but possibly the easiest, quickest and least disruptive is to whip out the corpse covered floor and pop in a new one. I gather that the original National Hive floors had a slope so water could run out which also gave the floors half turn symmetry so you could just pull out the floor turn it over and put it back under the hive, that's no longer the case with open mesh floors, it's easier to make horizontal ones and it's not like water pooling is going to be a problem.

New hive floor, flat packed like Swedish furniture.

Having seen the floor of Hive1 was deep with dead bees last week I ordered a new floor from Fragile Planet. Couldn't find them cheaper anywhere else, and it included a correx board to check the mite drop. Before assembling it I treated the wooden parts to a coat of shed and fence paint. Normally I wouldn't put that stuff on surfaces the bees will come into contact with as it probably has a pesticidal component to stop bugs gnawing on your sheds and fences but I don't want the floor to rot out from under the hive.

Treated for the weather

After a look at the instructions and viewing of the online video I knocked the new floor together. The floor it was replacing has a landing board -a sloping piece of wood the bees can land on before entering the hive. I didn't really have to time to add on to this floor as I wanted to get it under the bees asap.

Hive floor ready to go in

Landing boards seem to be more for the beekeeper than the bees anyway. It gives us a chance to see what's entering and leaving the hive, and whilst the bees will use it it may be something of a liability for them often being wet, providing purchase for mice and providing a place for bees to loiter whilst wasps pick them off. On the other hand some people suggest they make the bees' return easier to the hive after foraging.

After a quick peek under the crownboard I could see the bees were taking the fondant I'd  given them the previous week. Good news. Prising them apart with a hivetool I broke the propolis seal the bees had glued the brood box to the floor with and removed the brood box with the crownboard in place.

Deep in dead bees

As you can see it was pretty deep in dead bees. So deep they were actually blocking the exit stopping the remaining bees being leaving the hive at all. To keep the exits clear over winter beekeepers usually poke a stick or a wire into the entrance and waggle it about to create a clear space but with so many dead it didn't make a difference for this hive. I moved the corpse carpeted floor onto the ground the putting the new floor on the two beams supported by breeze blocks which I call a stand I popped the brood box back on, then replaced the insulation and roof. This time last year the bees were already active and filling supers, hopefully I'll be removing the insulation next week and the bees will begin building numbers as the weather warms.

I took the floor away from the hive and gathered the dead bees into a large metal bowl. Gave the chickens some but they weren't too impressed. Then I gave the propolis a quick scrape before lighting a butane torch and scorching all the wood and the mesh of the floor. Doesn't look as pleasant as it did now but my scorching was thorough so there shouldn't be any unpleasant germs or virii in there to infect the next set of bees it comes into contact with.

A thinner layer of dead bees in Hive2

That done I repeated the procedure with Hive2. A quick look under the crownboard showed me they're working the fondant. It had an almost complete carpet of bees on the floor but it was only one bee deep and hadn't blocked the entrance this time. This colony is larger than Hive1 at the moment and the bees were more active than I'd expected so a few puffs of the smoker were called for.

Floor, landing board, reduced entrance, and dead bees.

I placed the recently scorched floor from Hive1 on the stand and put Hive2 onto that taking away it's original floor. After removing the bees I scraped and scorched the last floor before putting it away till next spring when I'll probably repeat the whole process. In case you hadn't noticed beekeepers spend a lot of time cleaning things. The dead bees I've put in a sealed bin liner for now. A mate said she could add them to her compost heap. They might attract a few wasps but it's far better than popping them in the wheely bin. If the weather continues to improve I'll be starting proper hive inspections soon.

Hope there's no queen in this lot..