Avenues Open Gardens

This month was the Avenues Open Gardens.A two day event when a number of people living in Hull's Avenues area open their gardens up so Jane and Joe Public can wander in and have a look round. It's been happening every year since 1976 and somehow I've always managed to miss it but just for a change I managed to make it both Sundays this year. It's actually a lot more interesting than it sounds, honest. The gardens ranged from immaculate to cluttered, from the tasteful to the eccentric with pretty much everything in between including a little working railway, a brick built pizza oven, sculptures, every kind of patio, a small bridge, pagodas, pergolas and ponds -including, I was peased to see, a large number of wildlife ponds some of which held congregations of frogs and in one garden 150 Marmite jars, perhaps someone on a seriously high salt diet lost their recycle bin or something? One property had a sedum roof on it's garage which I popped up the ladder to have a look at. Unlike the one's on my beehives this was a fairly shallow affair which let rain water run off the sides rather than retaining it like mine. The owner said the sedum was supplied in a matting format so I'm guessing it includes some kind of water retention layer at the bottom. I think I may revisit mine and look at futher reducing their size and weight at some point.

Sedum roof, this was on top of a garage.

As well as the gardens to look at people were selling things ranging from garden and allotment related products like plants and jam to teas, coffee, cupcakes and vegetable sushi, books, pictures and assorted brick-a-brack.. There were a few musical offerings to be heard over the two days mainly ukulele players -you can't move in West Hull for ukulele players, I've even been known to give one a twang myself. Most of the day I had the B-52's "Rock Lobster" stuck in my head thanks to some ukulele players on a balcony at the first house we visited, a work in progress with a huge but unfortunately opaque green pond, till another set of ukulele toting locals managed to displace it with a cover of "These Boots Are Made For Walking."

The Open Gardens as well as helping instill a sense of community, and letting people show their gardens and view those of people they don't know also raises money for various charities. Previous recipients have included the Bumblebee Conservation Trust, Amnesty International, Victoria Avenue Fountain Fund, MIND, East Hull Comunity Farm, Sengwar Aid, Hull Ukulele Group and the Horn of Africa Appeal. Quite a diverse range of local and less local organisations.

You're probably thinking "Yes but what does this actually have to do with bees?" Well I did see a lot of bees collecting nectar. At one point I spotted a bumblebee collecting nectar from a foxglove which I thought would make a great photo so I whipped out my phone and took a picture.

There was meant to be a bee in this picture

Unfortunately the bee chose just that moment to fly away, I think the little black bit near the top right is it's rear end flitting out of shot. Photography fail. One garden had an old white painted hive amongst some raspberry bushes too.

There where actually two beekeeping related points of interest in the Open Gardens. One was the Friends Of The Earth Bee Campaign "The Bee Cause" which had something going on in the Pearson Park Wildlife Garden, I didn't actually get time to have a look at that so I'm afraid you'll have to follow the link to learn about that, the other was a nearby apiary (I notice whoever wrote that article seems to think mead is made from beeswax, nice bit of research there BBC Humberside, article uncorrected since 2008) just a few streets away from me on Marlborough Avenue. That makes three apiaries in under a mile with my hives, these and the two in Pearson park.

I popped in towards the end of the first Sunday to have a quick look at what was there. At the back of a rather nice, if slightly signage heavy garden -signs on pretty much everything telling you when it was found, built, rebuilt, planted, cut down or restored, was a building possibly an old stable or something and a chap from the Beverley Beekeepers was talking to some people about bee keeping (of course). A friend I'd been walking with had seen them earlier in the day and commented they weren't as aesthetically pleasing as my green shed & fence paint daubed boxes, and well.. she was right TBH. However I don't think the bees are particularly bothered by such things and they're tucked away behind a building anyway rather on display in the garden like mine so I guess aesthetics aren't that important. Perhaps the visual diversity makes it easier for the bees to identify their hives. The chap was explaining he makes all his own equipment from recycled or reclaimed wood. Thinking about it a super is a fairly easy thing to make really, I may try making my own if I need any more of them. I also noticed that most of his boxes didn't use mortise tenon joints on the corners like the ones I make. Perhaps I can get away with not using them and have an easier job next time I feel tempted to dig out my saw and hammer for a little wood butchery,

Something interesting, to me anyway, that he mentioned was when he was talking about bee feeders. At present I use contact feeders and Brother Adams feeders in Autumn but what he said he uses is plastic milk bottles with pin holes in the underside for the bees to draw syrup through. Part of his logic for this was you can see if they're empty or not unlike a white contact feeder and there's no chance of bees drowning like with a Brother Adam's feeder.

Bee hives made from reclaimed wood.

As you can see there's a lot of supers on some of these hives -that means a lot of honey bring produced. One of them had five in place. Shows how some bees are busier than others when it comes to storing honey, you can see in the image above one hive has only one super on it at the moment, maybe they're a new colony or maybe those bees haven't got the same work ethic as their more productive neighbours. With my own hives I;'ve noticed the bees in Hive2 seem to be harder workers than those of Hive1.

Brood and a half hive

Most of these hives used what's called a brood and a half for brood. This means the part of the hive the queen bee has access to lay eggs in is one deep box (the larger box at the bottom) and one super (the shallower box directly above it). In the above picture you can see a thin light brown line about half way up the hive, that will be the queen excluder so everything above that is used only for storing honey. Using a brood and a half means you can house a bigger colony on the downside it also means more work with two brood boxes per hive to inspect. I could be wrong but I think the brood boxes are deep nationals which have an internal volume of about 41 litres, I'm not sure of the volume of the super but I'd guess it's around 18 litres so these brood and a half hives have about 59 litres of volume for the bees to raise brood in. My own commercial brood boxes hold about 48 litres. Whilst Nationals are meant to be something of a standard in England it seems that people are now deciding the regular national brood box with a volume of about 36 litres is actually too small hence the existence of the deep national boxes used here and the practice of adding a shallow for more brood space.

Wasp trap in top left, mirror middle left.

To look at the entrances and floors of my hives I use an angled mirror glued to a stick which whilst looking suspiciously pervy works rather well. Turns out great minds think alike as looking at this apiary I noticed a number of mirrors placed to show the hive entrances to viewers inside the building. I also spotted what's looks like a wasp trap, the thing in the top left looking like a light bulb. Not photographed was a nucleus strapped to the top of a pole in the apiary placed there to catch swarms.

When I got home I decided to delineate the edge of my lawn with buried bricks, I'd seen it in a few gardens and it looked a lot better than I expected. Not being particularly big on procrastination I acquired a load of used bricks that evening and by ten had done one edge. I stopped when it got too dark to work. Today I resumed work which meant the edge nearest the bees. There's a few things bees dislike, specifically horses, fish, sweat and the sound of an idiot with a mallet banging bricks into the ground a foot from the hive. It wasn't long before I was being harried by honey bees so I decided to pop on a veil and jacket whilst I worked near the hives. As I got further from the hive I figured I could ditch these and carry on working. I was, of course, wrong. About five minutes later one bee came whizzing over and planted  a sting in the leather of my gardening glove and as I made my retreat another stung me on the scalp. I think I may be building a bit of immunity to bee venom now as it hardly hurt at all -although I was pretty quick in scratching the sting off, as you would be... I couldn't find the sting site so liberally applied toothpaste to the area and after taking an antihistamine decided to leave them to calm down for a couple of hours before resuming work.

Green Hive Roof mk.II

When I first set up my hives I had the intention of giving them green roofs. I posted a blog about the green roof on Hive1 back in June 2011. It looked good, I'm pretty sure it insulated the hive below nicely, was aesthetically pleasing, helped my hive look a little less obvious to bee paranoid neighbours and even gave the hive proper a little more shelter from the rain. However it was heavy, especially after a rainfall. My solution was to replace the large box with two smaller ones. I was initially considering using aluminium as it's light weight and fairly strong. The two problemns there were I havn't got a clue who could make the items from aluminium and as someone pointed out on a BBKA forum plants don't fare too well in aluminium containers -possibly to do with heat and cold I guess.

Stage one. Not quite done yet.

I opted for a material I've used a little bit before and know where to source. Wood. Specifically gravel board, a treated peice of wood meant to go at the bottom of a wooden fence to protect the fence from the damp ground. I still don't have a decent work surface so once again I got out the mini vices and used a double hive stand weighted down with breezeblocks and a cat.

Stabilise wobbly worksurfaces with breezeblocks and cats as required.

With my still worryingly unstable worksurface I cut the boards to size. My plan was to have three sides of the box hanging over the edge of the metal roof skin and somehow magically join them together once the boxes were in place then unconnect them when I needed to remove them so I could lift of half a green roof at a time.

Testing the fit.

As you can see I used mortise and tenon joins on the corners and a handfull of nails to hold them together. What you can't see is I also used some wood glue on the joints and to hold the pieces together as they dried I used a few staples too. With my prototype green roof it had orignially had a solid marine ply floor but I quickly discovered it was too heavy and cut out most of the floor to leave a frame around the edge to support a two layer lightweight plastic floor. I decided to do the same thing with these to help keep the weight down. I figured I could just use one layer of correx on these as they're so much smaller too. Satisfied with the fit on the hives on the roofs I added a shelf along the long side of each box held in place with yet more glue and nails. Next step was painting the boxes to match the hives. I decided to cut a corner at this point and poured a few litres of shed and fence paint into a bucket then dipped the submerged box ends in using a brush to work the paint across the long sides that hadn't been submerged. It worked okay giving me a pretty good coat of paint. It was also incredibly messy and took days to dry. As the wood was already treated the paint was just an aesthetic touch really.

Green Roof boxes. They're now green.

On the shelves I put a single layer of correx board with the internal walls running the short distance across the gap for support. Correx is the type of plastic FOR SALE and SOLD signs are made of. You can buy the stuff, but if you're lucky you can sometimes find it in the street or in a skip. The black plastic liner was just an offcut of pond liner. I folded the liner into place and used brass drawing pins to secure it. Once they're filled with the growing medium and the plants the contents will hold the liner in place so I'm not too concerned about the pins falling out later in their lives.

I then had to give a little thought to how I was going to joing the boxes to keet them in place. In the end I got some hasps from B&Q, they were the priciest part of the project and I needed one per box. I glued them into place then used the supplied screws to secure them properly. There was nothing to secure the hasps so I just drop a nail into each which seems to work adequately.

Green Hive Roofs Mk.II

The last stage was to add the growing medium and some plants. Once again I opted for mostly perlite as it's lighter than soil, and planted a mixture of sedums, some rockery plants and a few other things I felt might survive in the green roof boxes -over the course of a year they'll probably experience flood and drought conditions. I also transplanted all the plants from the original roof garden into these. It's not really the best time of year for plants to be getting used to a new container but I figure nature will take care of it and whilst some of the plants will quite probably die back others should survive and grow to fill the gaps left. They look nice enough, as the perlite settled I added some vermiculite to the top. Regarding further development I may at some point think about adding a mechanism to allow running off excess rain water, but for now I shall wait and see how they fare.

Green Hive Roof

A while ago I read something on the net about green roofs. I thought they were a pretty good idea, I'd also read that a beehive may need some insulation to keep the heat in over winter and in the summer the sun on the metal roof skin can make things pretty uncomfortable for the bees inside. So I figured why not put a green roof on the bee hive? It should provide insulation, it'll be more aestheticaly pleasing and it'll possibly reduce the amount of attention the hive draws from neighbours.

My first attempt at a green hive roof

Turns out nobody seems to sell them so I needed to do a little research then make one myself. I read all about the different layers used for drainage, growing medium and whatnot and thought it sounded a little complex. I figured with it being such a small area I could just ignore all that technical stuff anyway. So off I went and bought some exterior plywood for the bottom and some wood for the sides.Treated the sides to match the hive and made basically a box with the sides dropping an inch below the floor. This then sits on top of the hive's proper roof and won't slide off. Unfortunately it was too heavy so I cut out most of the floor leaving a frame in which I stuck two layers of correx.

I then lined it with pond liner underlay, pond liner and another layer of underlay and flilled it with mostly perlite, a little soil and some vermicompost. I'd read that sedums are the things for a low maintenance green roof so bought a few and some nice grassy looking stuff. Popped it all in the box and slapped it on the hive. It's all doing rather well. Mostly I let the rain water it but I've added a litre or two of tap water myself now and then to help it along. As you can see from the picture it's doing fine, and certainly looks nicer than the metal square with a brick on the top type roof common to many hives. When I want to work the hive I just lift it off and pop it on the floor then remove the regular roof which is still underneath, in the photo above you can see hive2 still has a bare metal skin.

It is a little on the heavy side in fact and I suspect the wooden sides won't last forever so my plan is eventually to make a new version using two halves, each being a watertight rectangluar box with a lip on three sides that completely cover the hive roof and clip together in the middle. I'm thinking of maybe using aluminium for this so it'll last longer and have thinner walls. That'll have to wait till I have some spare cash kicking around though.

I occassionally see bees investigating the sedum flowers on it, posibly even gathering pollen or nectar, and I think they may use it to identify their hive. At the moment the second hive has a large bonsai tree sitting on top of the roof, looks nice and holds the roof down but obviously doesn't insulate much.

Roof space