Using a Jig to build Frames

 Last year I moved to a house with a yard big enough for my bees and my dog. This year I got CHICKENS! 

Every afternoon toward the end of the day, I let the chickens out of their coop to free range for a few hours until their bedtime. They truly go to bed with the chickens at about 7 PM. 

But I'm so scared one will be snatched up by a hawk, so I stay outside with them as a foil to keep the hawk away. My neighborhood is territory for red-shouldered and red tailed hawks. I've heard both. 

To keep me busy, I have been building bee boxes, frames, and nuc boxes. All of these are in boxes that I ordered years ago (from Brushy Mountain when it was still in business) and have never put together. So I thought I'd show you how to use a jig to put together frames. You can build ten at once. I probably ordered the jig from Brushy Mountain as well, but other bee companies carry it. 

Mann Lake has them. So does Betterbee. They are not as common as they used to be. I think many people buy their frames pre-assembled. My jig is for medium frames.

Basically the jig holds the end bars in place and allows the beekeeper to glue and nail the top bars to the end bars. 

Then you flip the whole contraption over and glue and nail the bottom bars. Then if you put the assembly together right side up, the new completed frames just slide right out.

I am a hammer and nail woman, and I can do ten frames in about 20 minutes. If I were nail/brad gun kind of woman, I could do them in ten. It's very fast. I made 100 frames over two afternoons of mostly playing with the chickens and intermittently building frames.

Next afternoon with the chickens, I'm building nuc boxes. I have about six wooden ones unassembled in my shed. One order is so old an order that it actually came with nails, like they used to!

Fake Honey

This article is circulating among beekeepers right now. Everyone needs to know how bad it is that fake honey is in the market. I tell everyone to buy local honey - better yet, buy from a beekeeper you know. This article focuses on on-purpose dilution of true honey. 

As beekeepers, we also are possibly bottling honey that isn't real unless we truly take precautions. If you never feed your bees, then most likely your honey is pure nectar-based honey (unless your bees find a candy factory as in this article!). The French bees in the article produced blue and green "honey."

To be absolutely sure that you are harvesting pure honey, there are a couple of things you can do:

1. When/if you feed your bees, put food coloring in the sugar syrup. Blue is a good choice. Then if you pull a frame to harvest and the honey is blue or bluish, you can know that the honey contains sugar syrup.

2. Put a mark on the boxes that were filled with honey before you feed the bees and you can be assured that if you harvest from the marked boxes, you'll have pure honey in the frames and not honey that has been contaminated with syrup.

3. Never feed your bees during the nectar flow.

This is not an issue for me in that most years I don't need to feed my bees and if I feed the bees, I harvest long before that happens.

Bees Coping with the High Temperatures

I keep slatted racks on all of my hives, so I don't get bad bearding even in the hottest weather. A slatted rack is the size of a hive box and has slats that parallel the frames in a regular box. It's not a tall piece of equipment - about 2 1/2 inches tall. The slatted rack provides some space for bees to hang on the slats and ventilate the hive. 

This is what a slatted rack looks like: 

It goes on the hive below the bottom box and forms the top of the entrance above the bottom board.

But in the hottest weather, even with a slatted rack, the bees also are sent outside to help keep the hive cool both by taking their hot little bodies out of the cumulative body heat inside the hive and by working their wings.

This video was made when the temperature in Atlanta was in the 90s one recent afternoon. It's in slow motion so you can see their wings.

 

August Crossword: August Beekeeping Challenges

This month's crossword explores some of the challenges for bees and beekeepers in August.