• Apiary site by River Mole

  • Boiling tank for cleaning frames

I have 2 apiary sites:

    • home apiary in my back garden. Tends to be the primary site because it’s at home!
    • out apiary about 2 miles away in a semi rural location by the River Mole.

I also site a bait hive on a flat roof to the side of my house to attract  any swarms. Out of the past 5 years I’ve collected 4 swarms with only one of them being from my bees.

I’ve standardised on 14 x 12 wooden hives as I found it much easier when managing the bees to only have to go through one brood box. So I’ve either made 14 x 12 brood boxes and nucs myself or fitted ekes to the original BS National standard boxes I started out with.

The hives are on my homemade hive stands (details under the plans section).

I’ve also tried to raise my own queens with a Nicot kit and used Apideas  as mini mating nucs – with mixed success over the years.

As well as the hive equipment I have a boiling tank which I seem to use every other year to clean and sterilise old frames. It’s not used that much as the whole exercise tends to take about 2 days to fill, heat and then immerse the old frames in boiling water.  But it does work really well.

I’ve also made a solar wax melter with a stainless steel tray insert. When it gets sunny it can melt the wax out of frames in around 30 minutes, so it’s possible to clean up the frames from a brood box or super in a couple of days.