A Foray Into Carpentry

Something every bee keeper needs, other than a bucketful of stinging insects, is spare stuff. You need spare supers for the honey season and you need spare brood boxes for various swarm manipulations as well as housing more bees if you expand. Thanks to the auctions, eBay and Fragile Planet I have 6 supers and doubt I'll need more for a long time, however I don't have any spare brood boxes and as I use Commercial ones which are (currently) less popular than the Modified Nationals most of the nation favours there's less places to buy the things from and they're not cheap.

So I figured I'd make my own. My woodworking skills are very limited, I can more or less operate a hammer and a saw, but that's prettymuch it. A brood box is basically a box with the floor missing, so how hard can it be? I did two terms of woodwork at Driffield School, during that time they taught us bugger all. Well that's not quite true, they taught us how nails work, what glue does and that cellulose sealer smells funny. I'm pretty sure I already knew the first two and I've yet to find a use for knowing the third.

The first thing I needed were some hive plans. For the princely sum of £1.70 I was sent an A4 sheet of card printed on both sides. It might sound a bit steep for a piece of card printed on both sides but the fact is it should save a half decent carpenter a lot of money. You know what they say: give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day, teach him to make his own beehives and he can eat fish every day until he loses a thumb in a carpentry accident. Anyway if you want to make one yourself here's my own one sentence commercial brood box plans: Using 22mm thick wood make a box with no bottom measuring 465x465x270mm on the outside, cut a 10x11mm rebate along the inside top edges of two parallel sides. That's it.

The sides are meant to be joined by mortise and tennon joints. Mortise and tennon joints seem very useful things to know how to make. Unfortunately I didn't have a clue how to make them -still not sure which is the mortise and which is the tennon (or is it tenon?). Youtube to the rescue! In 4 minutes 50 seconds this guy taught me more than two terms of woodwork in a rural secondary school ever did. I also needed to know how to cut rebates, that was another mystery solved courtesy of youtube with a little help from wikipedia, turned out I needed something called a rebate plane or rabbeter plane.

Next thing I needed was some tools. I already had a drill, hammers, tape measures, nails, glue, woodfiller, a pencil and one of those right angle measuring things the name of which I forget -T square perhaps? It looks like a capital "L" and I pulled it out of council skip years ago. I needed a work surface, a vice, a tennon saw and a coping saw. However I wasn't buying a workbench and I'm not forking out for a proper vice. After a few minutes on eBay and I'd ordered the cheapest coping and tenon saws the world's marketplace had to offer and two mini vices. The two mini vices were cheaper than one proper vice and didn't need bolting to my worksurface. I also ordered a grandiosely named "Professional Duplex Rebate and Fillister Plane" for the princely sum of £17.50. The plane turned out to be a counterfeit Stanley No.78 Duplex Rabbet Plane -someone's taken a mould of one and is knocking out copies, it even had the Stanley model number embossed on the body so I was able to locate a pdf of the instructions for it. As for a worksurface I figured I'd use one of the hive stands from the auction.

Next up was some wood to make the thing from. Cedar is the best stuff to use, but hey if I wanted the best I wouldn't be banging this thing together myself would I? I've bought ply and recycled pine supers from Fragile Planet and they seem fine so I figure, as long as I treat the outside, pretty much any wood would do. So I went with whatever the local shop had -pine possibly? The sides are meant to be 270mm high and 22mm wide and I couldn't find that anywhere. However it turns out that all the wood in my local wood shop is displayed with incorrect measurements. So a 25mm piece of wood is 22mm thick -I have no idea why, maybe it's some tradesman secret to stop amateurs being able to build anything properly?

My first mistake was using a battery powered jigsaw to cut the lengths of wood to size. A battery powerred jigsw is great if you're in a hurry, but don't mind waiting 8 hours for the bloody thing to charge up. Mine was B&Q's cheapest offering from a few years ago and doesn't have an edge guide making it almost impossibleto cut a straight line with it. Still if you're in a hurry, can wait 8 hours and don't mind a slant to all your cuts then it's the business.

Improvised Workbench

Anyway I needed planks of wood 270mm height but the closest I could get was two pieces adding up to 286mm high, after a little thought I planed in a 16mm rebate in each where they met then used glue and screws across the rebates to join them together. I'd not used a plane before, it turned out to be pretty simple but fairly hard work. I suspect it was really such hard work because my worksurface was about 10" from the ground and wobbled like crazy. There's probably knack to using a plane so it doesn't keep getting clogged up but I didn't figure it out.

Cutting a Mortise or maybe a Tennon

After making the sides the right size I then had to cut the mortise and tenon joins. At this point I discovered that the cheapest tenon saw eBayers could import from Hong Kong was a little dangerous, with a blade given to unexpectedly folding during use. After straightening the thing for the third time I gave up and opted to use an old garden saw I've had kicking about in the shed for the past decade. I also found that the cheapest coping saw in the world evidently came with some the worlds cheapest blades which kept twisting and snapping during use. A trip to Mac's Tool's on Newland Avenue got me a pack of new blades for just under 2 beer tokens.

The box went together fine although the joints weren't too pretty what with the lengths being a little out thanks to the convenience of power tools. Used a bit of glue and some 2" aluminium nails leftover from restoring the original hives to reinforce the joints. Added a little wood filler on the gaps where the joints looked shoddy -as I won't be using the box till next summer at the earliest I figure that any VOCs in the filler or glue will be long gone by then. Treated the outisde with Shed & Fence paint and ended up with a functional brood box, not bad for £9 worth of wood, £1 of screws, and possibly another £1 worth of glue and filler.

First Homemade Brood Box

I figured I could probably do better than that, and could probably use a second spare brood box anyway, so I popped back to the local wood shop and got another two planks of wood, once again ignoring their measurements and measuring them myself. The wood and screws weighed in at £11 this time, not sure why but they've let me have some off cuts for free in the past so I can't complain. This time I decided to cut them manually using my ancient garden saw.

Think I'm starting to the hang of this

Without the wonders of technology I managed to cut the edges nice and straight. Clamped the pieces to the long edge of a hive stand, stabilised it with a couple of breeze blocks and started planing. It took a couple of hours and I finished in darkness but managed to get them all done in an evening.

Second Homemade Commercial Brood Box

After a wait for some decent weather I glued the joints, drilled guide holes through the mortises or maybe the tennons -whichever the bit that sticks out is called anyway, then banged in some galvanised clout nails . I did use a little bit of wood filer here and there but not a lot. I reckon the result is far neater than my first attempt in fact.

Prior to this I'd knocked together some flatpack supers and made up some clearer boards and follower boards, not very challenging stuff. Both brood boxes are functional, bee tight and hold the frames as intended without letting the wind whistle through. I'm pretty certain that with a decent work surface, meaning one that's more than 10" off the ground that doesn't wobble like a weeble in an earthquake, it'd be a far easier job to do and to get more accurate cuts and angles. I could have got a flat packed Commercial Brood box from Thornes delivered for £49.88 (or assembled for £63.51). This little project cost me £40 on tools and about £24 on materials so for two boxes I've saved quite a bit and obviously I still have the tools for later use.