I have 2 apiary sites:
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- 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 more rural location next to the River Mole.
I also site a bait hive on a flat roof to the side of my house to attract any swarms at the beginning of the season. Out of the past 6 years I’ve collected 5 swarms with only one of them being from my bees.I normally put the bait hive out early in May just before the swarm season starts.
I use a mix of 14×12 cedar hives as well as BS National. 14 x 12 are easier as its only brood box to go through. It also means the bees don’t run out of space which for my out apiary site means it’s one less chance of them swarming if I don’t get to perform a weekly inspection. For my 14 x 12 set-up I’ve either made 14 x 12 brood boxes and nucs myself or used ekes for the original BS National standard boxes..
I tend to use BS National kit in my home apiary and run double brood boxes as the season is longer and the bees seem to need more space but strangely more bees doesn’t translate to more honey.
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 complete mainly to fill, heat and before immersing the old frames in boiling water. But it does work really well. It also works well for cleaning up queen excluders.
I’ve 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.The frames still need to be cleaned up with a hive scraper before reusing unless I’ve enough ready to get the boiling tank out.