Week 18 - Design and label the broad box and build it

This week I am starting to design the brood box of the hive and I will also label it. The brood box is also another important part of the hive, it is where the queen bee lives, without her, the colony dies and it is also the 'nursery' where all the larva (baby bees) are born and grow up into worker bees. Without this part of the hive, the colony wouldn't really die as they could always use the honey super box on top of the brood box. The honey super is basically the same as the brood box in every way, the only difference it has is that it is smaller. But then there wouldn't be an area for the bees to store their honey if there was no brood box. The main point of difference of the brood box is that it is larger than the super, this allows for more bees to be produced by the queen, so in turn the colony will grow more and won't die out as easily.

My early designs of the brood box of the hive are down below and labelled:

Below are the pictures of me building the brood box of the hive at the different stages:

First, I am cutting a piece of wood to length that I have already measured twice, but I am using a saw because I forgot to use the circular saw to cut the pieces of wood, which is my mistake.

Also, I am building my hive in the sheep shed, which is why there are sheep in the background and will be in the background in other pictures!  

In this picture I am cutting another piece of wood to the same length to the one I have just cut. I am using the previous piece of wood to help cut the wood to make sure that it is the same - as it is quicker than having to re-measure it. 

Now I am using a tool to sand down the edges of the wood where I cut with the hand saw to smooth them out. I only had to do it on these two pieces of wood as they were cut with the hand saw, (the pieces of wood cut with the circular saw had a good finish on the wood and didn't need to be smoothed).

Now I am cutting the other two pieces of wood for the brood box frame, as you can see, I am using the circular saw now as it is far quicker than the hand saw and it also leaves a much better finish and it is also more precise when cutting.

You can see here how good a finish the circular saw leaves, as it is very smooth and looks very nice.

If this was done with the hand saw, then it would look very messy with a very rough finish.

I am now drilling the holes for the screws for when I will join the two pieces of wood together to make the frame. I am using a drill that my dad already has, so it helps to stop me from acquiring one from else where.

This is what the drill hole looks like - this is where the screw will go when I will join it to the other piece of wood.

This is another picture of me drilling the holes on the two pieces of wood that the screws will be on. 

There will be 6 holes on one piece of wood, three at each end, on two planks for the frame.

Now I am using the wood glue I purchased on the plank of wood that I will be joining to make the frame, in this picture I put the glue on too generously and when I make the join it will dribble down the side, but this isn't a big problem as I can just wipe it off.

This is what the join will look like with the glue and screw attached, you can see that the two frames are flush and that there is no overlap and is a nice clean join.

This is another angle of the join which shows that the glue is not dribbling out as much as I predicted it would, also you can see that there is now gap in the join and that it is very tight and close together because of the screws.

This is a picture of 3 of the planks joined together held by 4 screws and wood glue, but it is not very strong at this point, until the final plank is added and the frame will be complete.

This is a picture of me applying wood glue to the final join where the last plank with go, and where I will use 6 screws to fix it in place.

This is what it looks like with the wood glue applied and before the last plank is put on top. 

This is now the final frame with all four planks joined together by wood glue and screws. After I had completed the frame it became very strong and sturdy and would be very hard to break or damage.

Now that I have completed the frame for the brood box, I need to make a 'shelf' for the beehive frames to sit on inside the box. I will need to two shelves on each end of the broad frame to support these frames.

This is what the broad frame looks like with two shelves in it and a foundation frame (foundation is a wax sheet bee keepers use as a base for the bees to build their comb on ) in place, sitting perfectly and supported.

After doing this however, I discovered that there was too big of a gap between the frame and the shelf, you can see here on the left side of the frame,  that there is a bigger gap than there is on the right side.

So to fix this problem, I put in another frame next to the previous frame to help support it further and to make the gap smaller. This gap is significant as in a hive, precision is everything! This is to ensure that there is a big enough gap for bees to work back to back. If the gap was too large, the bees would start extending the comb out to fill the gap and so make it impossible to manage.

Now I have to screw these shelves together and then to the frame to ensure they will not move and will stay in one place. So I drilled holes (missing the screws already there to screw the planks together to make the frame).

This is what the screws look like along the frame, I also didn't use wood glue to join the shelves to the frame, this is because it would be too difficult to do as the wood was hard to put in position and it would be to tricky to use glue.

This is what the brood box looks like with the shelves in it, this is the side with two shelves on, as I did not need to put two on each side.

This is what the Broad box looks like with al 11 beehive frames added into it, this is now what a normal brood box looks like.

Now all that is left, is to add handles onto the sides of the brood box, this is to help the beekeeper to carry the brood box as it is heavy when empty and will be even heavier when full of honey. Handles will make the task of carrying it much easier.

So in the picture you can see that I have already measured and cut out pieces of wood for the handles, and I have also pre-drilled holes for the screws and placed the screws in ready to be drilled.

This is a picture of the piece of wood with wood glue on, I used wood glue for the handles because they handles will need to be very strong if they are to hold the entire weight of the brood box.

This is what the finished brood box looks like with all the frames in and the handles screwed and glued to the side of the hive. It is now complete and ready to be used by the bees in a hive.

While building the brood box I encountered several problems, I had to overcome these problems while building brood box to make it perfect, these were:

1) One problem I uncounted when building the brood box is that when I put in the shelves, to support the frames, there was too large a gap.

• The solution to fix this problem, was putting in another plank of wood along one of the shelves, this reduced the gap and now it fits perfectly.

2) Another problem was that I started to cut the wood with a handsaw instead of the circular saw.

•     The solution to fix this was that I smoothed out the edges where I cut with the saw for a better finish.