My kids love honey.
That, my friends, is one of the greatest understatements ever. My youngest would eat it on anything and everything. PB&H is his go-to sandwich.
Truth be known, we adults love it, too 🙂
We all have heard that local honey is best. True that. It is also expensive. A budget buster at the rate we go through it.
I have some good friends who started keeping honeybees last year, and I always thought it would work out well… maybe we could barter eggs for honey once their honey production was up.
Then I realized I would need a LOT more chickens (and they’d need a LOT more bees) in order for that to be anywhere near a workable solution.
Jokingly, I mentioned to Jerry that we should get our own bees and teach the kids how to be beekeepers and raise our own honey.
Funny how a joke can turn. We soon realized that this is exactly what we should do. I asked my friend about the Nashville Area Beekeeper’s Association class he went to last year. Turns out, it was the following weekend! I scrambled and got signed up, and Jackson and I attended the day and a half class to learn the basics of beekeeping. It was a great class, and by the end I knew that this was no longer a joking matter, we were going to keep bees.
That was February. Fast forward to present day. One of the appealing things about building an apiary (a fancy word for a place where bees/hives are kept) is that Jerry is learning a lot about carpentry, and he was very much on board to build the hives for us.
We found a great reference for building the Langstroth style hives that we’ll be using in Building Beehives for Dummies. I told myself I would never buy one of those “…for Dummies” book because I don’t really appreciate the implication and use of the word. HOWEVER, in this case, it really had the best step-by-step detailed plans for what we were doing. It even includes multiple styles of hives and all of the nice-to-haves we might add later (like a top feeder system).
We have two starter hives (“nucs”) that should be ready for pickup in early May (read: “any day now”), so we have officially entered scramble mode for the building project.
My parents took the boys on a vacation adventure to Colonial Williamsburg a few weeks ago. While they were gone, Jerry and I tackled the first steps of building the hives.
We started with the hive bodies, since these require finger joints in order to make very strong boxes (to hold lots of honey!). Jerry built a sled for his table saw to help push the long boards and run the vertical pieces of wood through the table saw, and then we rigged a jig for the actual cuts.
It was neat to see how quickly we could get the boards cut once the jig was in place. Before we knew it, we had a stack of boards that looked like pieces from a puzzle.
Here’s a quick video of Jerry running the boards through the dado blade on the table saw:
The next weekend, Jackson helped me assemble the hive bodies. This involved gluing the joints, drilling pilot holes, and nailing each joint. All this was done while making sure that each box was square. Jackson was a huge help, and we got into a rhythm and were done in no time.
Since then, Jerry has built out the tops, inner covers, and bottoms. I had a bit of trouble tracking down a reasonable source for flashing for the tops (to keep water out) and #8 hardware cloth for the screened bottom board (to keep strange bees from coming in and to let the inevitable varroa mites fall out), so they are not quite complete yet. And, they still need painting. All in all, it is neat to see two basically complete hives mostly ready for their residents.
I will get them painted, and then hope that my hardware cloth arrives quickly!
Until next time…
–The busy little bees at Crack of Dawn Farms!
Honey bear image courtesy of Boians Cho Joo Young at FreeDigitalPhotos.net.