Plain Talk: Building Your Own Bee Boxes (211)

Episode 211 – Plain Talk: Building Your Own Bee Boxes

Jim Tew: Hey, Honey Bee Obscura podcast listeners, honestly, this topic is for me today. I truly try to choose something every week that would intrigue, titillate most of you, but I want to do this one. Last week or sometime recently, maybe this segment hasn't run yet, I just don't know, I did a piece and I said that one of the things about mentoring people was that you needed to amalgamate surrounding industries.

I mentioned agriculture and ecological endeavors and seed companies and that kind of thing. The thing I didn't mention then that I'm mentioning now is that one of the things that is a potentially integral part of beekeeping is woodworking. Now, hold on. Hold on. Give me a chance here. I want to talk for just a few minutes about my experiences and about why I tried building my own beehives for a long time and honestly, why I stopped building my own beehives.

Hang on just a minute and see if any of this is for you, because I can tell you here a spoiler alert that yes, a lot of you do try to build at least parts of your own equipment. I'm Jim Tew. I come to you once a week here at Honey Bee Obscura, where I do my best to talk about some aspect of plain talk beekeeping.

Introduction: Welcome to Honey Bee Obscura, brought to you by Growing Planet Media, the producers of the Beekeeping Today podcast. Join Jim Tew, your guide through the complexities, the beauty, the fun, and the challenges of managing honey bees. Jim hosts fun and interesting guests who take a deep dive into the intricate world of honey bees. Whether you're a seasoned beekeeper or just getting started, get ready for some plain talk that'll delve into all things honey bees.

Jim: Listeners, this is part of my journey. It may or may not be parts of your journey. I don't know why that I was intrigued with woodworking really as early as I can remember. When I was a kid, I would pull nails out of Dad's shop where he had driven nails and exposed to before us to hang tools on, to hang anything on. Nails were desperate. I would pull out any nail. Any nail could be the right nail, straighten it, reuse it, maybe just tack pieces of wood together and improvise an airplane and then fly this airplane around the yard.

For those of you who are younger, times were different then, so you may do with what you had. Early on, I had a serious appreciation for brand new nails in a bag. It came in a keg in those days. Oftentimes those kegs get tossed out and bees would end up in them, swarms. When I came into beekeeping, everybody was saying, "Look for old nail kegs because there's a good chance they have bees in them." In the seventh grade, in junior high school, I suppose that's middle high school now, honestly, I can't keep up with the changes in the grades and who's at what school and why, but I took a shop class.

Oh, it was heavenly because just a few years prior to that, my dad bought a saber saw from Sears and Roebuck at the time, Sears and Roebuck. Listeners, sadly, I thought, "Well, we've got a fully equipped shop now. There is no limit to what we can build, and we have a saber saw," a single speed, plug-in electric saber saw. As an aside, I still have it in my shop right now, the very first power tool that dad ever bought that meant anything to me. That was the only tool I had.

When I went to that shop class at junior high school, the world was exposed to me. Yes, as you might expect, that shop class is gone. The shop classes in high school that I took, all gone. I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing, because there were some dangerous moments there. That was my first exposure. I built a bookcase. Ironically, listeners, many years later, as that bookcase got wet in a storage shed and was cracking and breaking and buckling, I repurposed that wood into building frame top bars that I was building at the time. I can only suppose that I had a lot more time as a younger guy to spend cutting out frames, but more about that later.

This is what I want to tell you. I didn't really practice. I didn't mean to. I don't know why, but I had an early interest in woodworking, and it was primitive, hand saws, whatever you can come up with, but I had an early interest and it grew, and it grew. When I got to high school, I took a much more sophisticated shop class. Again, it was called shop, not industrial arts, but shop. You could use dangerous machinery and you could really cut off body parts and you could really do serious damage to yourself. There was no quick stop tools. You could really screw up, but I didn't.

I built a bedroom suit out of knotty pine, which for another story for another time was actually stolen out of my dad's barn. Somebody stole my high school shop project. That's another story too. This is where I want you to be now. When I went the first time to a bee lab, I was going to drop the class. I was not going to stay in beekeeping. When I went to that lab, and I've told the story, and there was all those packages of bees in the middle of the room and all those people standing around excited about beekeeping, and I began to understand the simple design of the boxes.

Get ready for it, I thought to myself, "I can build this stuff," because by then dad had more tools and I had more tools and to look at those simple boxes, clearly I could build that. I'm comfortable telling you here from a very personal standpoint that one of the reasons I keep bees today is because I had such an early fundamental interest in woodworking and the fact that I could build these boxes. Before that, I had built chicken coops and raised chickens. Done all cages, birdhouse boxes, whatever. This was nothing really foreign to me just to go one step more for beekeeping.

I built my own boxes for a while. In fact, I built a lot of boxes. I built my own frames until I came to my senses. As I recall, there was something like, I don't know, 17 cuts to those frame top bars. This is a true story. It has an exaggeration factor of none. One day on Christmas day, as soon as all the festivities were over and life moved on, I was so impatient to get out to dad's shop and get on with meaningful work, cutting out top bars.

Just as soon as I could, I left all the activity. I left the nice lunch on the table after we had finished. I rushed out and I proceeded to continue to cut out frame top bars. Monotonous cut after monotonous cut after monotonous cut. I did hundreds of them. I had a pile of top bars on the floor. I don't want to be too dramatic, but I do want to be truthful.

I suddenly had a clear thought, "What are you doing? Sure, you can do this, but look at what it's costing you in time and you're not really saving any money. Even though the quality of your top bars is decent, you could buy them completely cheaper than you could ever do this." I can only call that an epiphany. Shortly thereafter, as soon as I finished the blanks that I had cut out, I quit. I walked away from that project as having been duly tried and duly found to be lacking. That's not a comment for you. That's a comment for me. Let's hear from our sponsor who ironically sells this kind of equipment.

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Jim: Yes, I had planned to say this later on, but I'll say it right now. Building frames is one of the things that most people in woodworking don't do just because the dedicated machinery, the dedicated cuts that it takes, it's just not worth it. Now you decide if it's worth it for you. What kind of wood shop do you have? What kind of ability do you have? What kind of passion do you have? Maybe it's okay for you.

I gave it my best shot and building frames did not work for me. I did find that cutting out deeps and six and five supers was more palatable. In the case of frames and end bars, where I said I built thousands, several thousands, like three, maybe five thousand, I built several hundreds of deeps and supers, and it looked like a beehive because by then I was buying frames and I was wiring them. It was those days where you wired the frames and then embedded the foundation and waxed foundation.

At some point it just became not worthwhile to even do that. The other companies had discounts and you could get cheaper grade boxes that were as good as what I was building because I was using low quality lumber. It was not like I was building furniture. I began to lose that passion, and this was critical, I began to lose that passion for housing my own bees, for being the constructor of my bees' houses.

When you'd lean on that beehive, it was mine. I had built really almost everything in it. I was now responsible for the animals that were in it, and I had a real sense of purpose and a clearness of thought. I began to lose that as I realized you could keep more bees, you could strike more honey, you could go to more meetings, you'll probably have more money if you just bought the equipment. Slowly but surely, I began to phase out.

Now at this point of this discussion, I want to say this. Absolutely none, not a single one of those frames, or those supers or those deeps that I built survived. Not to my knowledge. I don't have one out of all of them, and I could recognize them because I knew the cuts that I was making. I didn't use box joints on the edges. I just used dados. I know my work. I would recognize it. There's nothing left. They're all gone.

A bee box just has about a seven year lifespan. You can paint it and repair it and do whatever. If you really keep bees and you really use it and it really stays out in the weather, you're going to get about seven years out of it before the corners rot out or you break off the top small part that where you hang the frames. Something's going to go wrong. Those boxes don't last that long anyway. When I was in the frame building phase, the equipment building phase, you could find books everywhere. I incorrectly thought that this building your own box business had passed. Every bit like producing comb honey and basswood boxes or something like that.

It's one of those things that was gone. People just don't do this thing anymore. There's too many good bee supply companies, too much reasonably priced equipment available. People just don't do-- Well, I found out in a heartbeat. Go to the web. You are 100% wrong. There are books and videos that are replete with how to build your own equipment. It's really intriguing because I got to say this correctly now, in many ways, those recommendations to simplify it and to make it practical for us to build our own equipment we're going backwards, especially in the area of frames.

I looked at several articles. I'm not trying to give a lit review. You do your own literature review on the web. I've got to shuffle some papers here to get to it. One of the articles that I looked at that was really interesting was from Family Handyman of this-- well, depending on when this episode runs, of this year, July 23rd, 2024, they did a piece on how to build your own beehive. Fine woodworking, years ago. Had a very complex piece on how to build your own beehive, and then just a few years ago, they had a much simpler version on this old house, not the same thing, on how to build a beehive, and they too modified the end bars on the frames.

They went back to a single piece with a notch cut on either end and a groove on one side to contain the foundation insert. That was it. What I would tell you was an old Hoffman self-spacing frame that we've all had, what, millions of. We're going back to previous Hoffman frames that were not self-spacing. As late as the '20s and '30s, I think, I didn't check this out, but it was somewhere then you could buy a small metal band that started on one side of that end bar, went up and over the top bar and then down the other side and you tacked it into place and it had four bulges. That made it a self-spacing frame.

These new plans don't even have that. You just have to individually center the frames, or use some kind of frame spacer up in the lug where the frames hang and put a frame spacer there that would automatically space the frames out. There's all ways to do it. Here's the bottom line, is that we are going back in some of these plans to simpler frames because to build that shouldered scalloped end bar was another piece that had dramatic numbers of cuts and saw setups to make it work.

Those of you who work wood know what I'm about to say, but those tedious cuts on those small pieces that you make over and over and over again are really invitations to cut off a body part. Your brain just goes numb after you make the same simple cut with the spinning blade there over and over again. You get hurt. Since this is not mechanized, since I was doing it from scratch, it was remarkably boring and very tiring. You basically just wore out the same body parts making the same movements.

I've got multiple old books. Let's Build a Bee Hive by Wilbert R. Miller, and it's a real simple constructed book, and I don't see where it even has a year in it. I'm betting that this was about 1970 or so. I've got a book here called Build Your Own Beehives by Joe Cochran. It's 1980. What year is this? 2024 or 2025. I bought this book in 1980. I don't know what to say. You maybe you almost need to be a woodworker before you take this on, because these books, if they really go into the detail on how to build your own hive, they use things that you really probably wouldn't just have in your repertoire.

One of the things right off the bat on this list of things you're going to need, other than a table saw, is you're going to need a dado stack set to cut that three quarter inch wide groove, or that three quarter inch wide joint across the top. To run a dado set, you're probably going to have to have-- help me out wood workers. You can probably get by with a half horse, but I bet you a three quarter horse motor on that table saw is going to be even better.

It labors the saw. You got to build jigs, so you got to be committed to doing this kind of thing. I loved doing it. That worked okay. I enjoyed doing it. Why am I doing this presentation? It was one of the phases that I went through in beekeeping where I used an earlier skill that I had. It was only about seven years ago that I quit woodworking. I just built everything I'd wanted to build. My family had everything. Asthmatic in my old age, I still got all those tools, lathes, bandsaws, I got it all. It's in vintage form, just sitting there waiting for me to be young again.

I can tell you two things besides frames, well, including the frames, that were challenging, the frames and the end bars were tricky, tricky to build. Really not worth it. Maybe you wouldn't think of this, but the second thing that was really hard to do was cut in hand holes. There was never a gadget commonly available that I know of that you could just buy from a bee supply catalog or anywhere else that would let you cut those hand holes in place. You would end up using a block of wood that you'd put at one end or so. You build a jig to put that on. You could come up with ways to make these neat and clean. You're probably just going to use dado joints on the end instead of the finger joint box joints.

One of the things I found, I'm out of time and I'm talking as fast as I can, but one of the things that I found was the instruction manual for the care and operating for the Johnson dovetailing machine. I know Johnson knew better, but that machine did not cut dovetails, it cut box joints. It was a dedicated table saw that you bought in the bee supply magazine that was set up to cut the box joints that you needed to build beehives with. That machine is gone. We had that machine at my lab. It's one of the things that blew away in the storm.

I need to tell you that if you've got the ability, you have the inclination, it's enjoyable for a while to build your own equipment. To build what? Maybe you build nukes, build whatever you want, it's up to you. The stark reality is you can always buy it cheaper and better from the bee supply manufacturing companies, and we've always been able to do that. Finely cut, finely machined beehive equipment has always been available. Give it a shot. If you've got the equipment, if you've got to go buy the table saw, if you've got to develop the propensity for using it, you probably waited too late. Just go buy the stuff directly from the company, as maybe assemble it yourself would be enough.

Don't even bring up the other kinds of hives, like the top bar hives or the Warre plans. One of the first bunch of bees that I bought here at Ohio State, some of the boxes were made from butternut, sometimes called white walnut, and the planer had a nick in the blade so you could pick out those butternut boxes because it had that plane mark where it went through the plane to smooth it out, the planer to smooth it out. I've scurried and looked years ago and all of the thousands of boxes that we had trying to find one of those first early boxes.

You have an idea how this story ends, don't you? Seven years. You get about seven years out of a bee box and it's done, so I never found one. For those of you who have the equipment, give it a shot. For those of you who have the ability, give it a shot. For those of you who've got to learn woodworking before you can do this and your beekeeping project, probably not going to be worth it.

For those of you who do, it was a really enjoyable, fulfilling part of my life. It's like raising your own queens, where you have a very paternal feeling about this is my queen. I knew you when you were a three-day-old larva. When those bees in that box that you built, you're doing it all. You are a beekeeper and I built the house for those bees. It was very satisfying, but it's a unique, dedicated part of beekeeping that's frequently just not worth it. That's it for this week. I'll look forward to talking to you again next week or even sooner. That's it. Bye-bye.

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