How to assemble bee hive frames
Eric: So this is our Ford Fiesta. I don’t know if you heard about this but Ford Motor Company contacted me and said, “Hey do you like a brand new Ford Fiesta for the summer?” And I was like, “Well what’s not to like about that?” So it’s part of a deal. They are giving us this car for six months, we’re going to try it out, we’re going to tell people about it on Twitter or on Facebook, in YouTube, and all of that kind of thing. So I’m pretty excited about it.
Female: AJ.
Male: I’ll try this again. So anyway, thank you for and thank you for the people who put these all together especially Jenny and she knows who she is. She’s the one who made it all happen. But all the beekeeping stuff in the car so I’m going to get it out, go to work.
Female: I bet it’s the only Fiesta that has beehives in the back.
Male: It’s yeah, that’s going to have Labradors very soon but I got to cover all the carpet before you put the dogs in there. I don’t think the Ford wants a car back full of Labrador hair. So very cool, you know, my trucks don’t have this so it’s like, pops open like that.
Female: Your truck door doesn’t even shut.
Male: Yes well, bungee cord will fix that. And here we go we got all sorts of new equipment here. Look at this. We are going to have two different kinds of frames in our hive. We’re going to have plastic cone for the honey supers in other words, the boxes that hold frames for honey production and then we’re going to use beeswax for the brewed foundation. In other words, where the bees are going to raise their young, the frames are going to have beeswax on them. And there’s a lot of you know, every beekeeper has about 10 different opinions about what to use where but this is what our teacher suggested so this is what we’re doing okay?
Female: So there.
Male: Yes. Now on the greenhouse side, there’s a beekeeping section and a bunch of new beekeepers and some experienced once are there so you could come and check that up. We’re going to be using two different kinds of frames. We’re going to be using a wedge top frame and they come like this and you pop off this piece of wood here, well you could probably cut it, it would be better. So cut off this piece of wood.
Female: Were it supposed to come it like that.
Male: Yes it supposed to come out like that and we just clean this up. Let’s take that piece of wood out of there. All frames are going to have a grooved bottom. We’re not using a split bottom frame or a wedge bottom just a grooved bottom frame like this. All right, what you want is you want some wood glue and you want—
Female: Is that different from a gorilla glue?
Male: Yes do not use gorilla glue. I’ve been told not to use polyurethane glues so I love gorilla glue for other things. I also have my brad nailer.
Female: It’s purple.
Male: And it works but you can use a tack hammer as well. So when I take the wedge top and we’re going to take just a little bit of glue. Too much glue and the glue doesn’t work but that’s even a little too much there. So you take that and spread that glue around. You don’t want to glop it on you just want a little bit. Maybe that’s a little bit too much actually. And that presses in like that.
You see that the fact that the glue is coming out, that’s a little too much glue.
Female; Is that bad for the bees or it’s just wasteful?
Male: It’s wasteful and the glue is less efficient that way.
Female: On the outside.
Male: Because what you try to do is get the wood that bind to itself and you get too much glue in there that gets in the way. And then, you want to nail this from the sides. Don’t nail it from the top because when you nail from the top when you’re scraping your hives, your scraper is going to hit the nail every time okay? If you have big fingers like I do, you can use a little needle nose.
You can also use, this is called brad nail set. It’s about a $6.00 tool, you can buy this at the hardware store. It has a little hole in here and the nail goes in here. And then if you’re going to put it in a piece of wood, you put it like this and you press down, and then it sets with a finished nail in there. If you have a nail gun, I call this a nail gun, it’s called the brad nailer. I will just turn on the compressor.
All right we have air power now so let’s go back to this. This brad nailer is inexpensive.
Female: And loud.
Male: And it shoots in right in there. That’s a great thing.
Female: Is it solid?
Male: Yes that’s not going anywhere. I mean the glue is actually holding it more than anything. The nails had some strength but then if you’re not careful, you spill like that. We have the—this is actually the top and the sides. Now open on the bottom. Okay so this again is our groove bottom. That’s going to go here.
Female: The glue faces in.
Male: Right. So the bottoms went now from the side. So now, we’re going to lay in the foundation and by the way, you know these pieces are a little broken here. They got a little crack from us moving them.
Female: Yes.
Male: But don’t worry about that.
Female: The bees will fix it.
Male: The bees will fix that so this is just kind of tricky to get in. There’ll be a gap in each side here. You know, you can see it through.
Female: Yes that’s okay.
Male: But that’s okay. And this goes in here and it’s going to hold the wire so that end of wire is going to between the two pieces of wood like that. I’m not going to use the nail gun on this because we’re going to want to be able to pull these back out again. And then with the nail gun, it will be hard to get out. So I’m just going to tap this in with a tap hammer.
All right so there you go. This is a wood frame with the beeswax foundation or bees waxwired foundation. Oh! I forgot the side nails. So these pins, you can see they have a slot in them. They’re going to go in from the side and hold the beeswax foundation. Basically, it makes a lot stronger. They use to run wires back and forth and people still do that, they run wires across the frame. But I like these pins and so does my teacher, so that’s we’re going to use.
There you go. All right, pretty simple. Now, we’re going to do the plastic foundation. This also just comes as a complete plastic frame as well. Again, more I don’t know, people have very different opinions about this but this is what we’re going to use with what teacher suggested, okay. This is going to be a little different and that this is a grooved top, there’s no wedge in here. So this hast to go in here and then we build this around this. Not much glue at all. And there we go. Okay so there you go. You’ve got your beeswax foundation and your plastic foundation. We’re going to get our package of bees, we’re going to hive the package. We’ll make video of that and we’re set to go. So come to the greenhouse, we have a beehive, beekeeping discussion section on the site. Some knowledgeable people and there’s people like me to think I know how to do it. So all right have a great day. See you later.
Transcription by:
Scribe4you Transcription Services