EQUIPMENT FOR BEEKEEPING

When you first start to keep bees there are a few bits of equipment you will need.

BASIC EQUIPMENT
     
   
                                             
1. Bee suit to stop the little suckers from stinging you   2. Gloves to stop the little suckers from stinging your hands   3. Smoker to let the bees know you're coming when you check their hive
                                             
 
                                             
4. Hive tool to help you move frames around in the hive and take the queen excluder off etc   5. Beehive for storing the brood chamber (bottom box) and Super (top box)
                                             
 
                                             
6. Frames & Foundation - These are frames that contain wax sheets with impressions of hexagons that the bees can "draw" out for the queen to lay eggs in (in the brood chamber) and also to store honey (mainly in the Super)
                                             
As you progress in beekeeping your list of equipment will get longer but for us this is what we started with.

Equipment can be bought new or secondhand, the choice is up to you. We decided to buy new to start with. Our mentor Pete Shaw is the agent for Thornes in South Wales. This is a company that specialises in beekeeping equipment and this is where our hives and frames with foundation came from. You can find them on the internet at www.thorne.co.uk.

Another good site for the other basics like the suit, gloves smoker and hive tools is www.beebasic.co.uk. They have very good deals and we got our other bits from them.
                                             

I went to pick the hives from Pete one wet Sunday afternoon; he had all the bits ready for me when I arrived at his house. We had a bit of a chat then off I went with 2 flat-packed hives, instructions on how to put them together and all the frames I would need and the foundation to go with them. When I go to Pete’s I am like a kid in a sweet shop, so many nice things to buy. Anyway I arrived home about half an hour later and started to put the hives together.

You can get a couple of hives. One type is the WBC (William Broughton Carr) hive. This has inner boxes covered by an outer box and is the idyllic hive seen in Winnie the Pooh books. Our hives are Nationals, which are single-walled, and as I said they came flat-packed. You get the floor, brood box, super, crown board and roof I also got a queen excluder for each hive (this is a metal grid that sits on top of the brood box to stop the queen entering the super but allows the workers free access). I will explain all the terms in more detail as I go along and you will also be able to see from the pictures the different parts that make up the hive.

So there I was pretending to be a master craftsman, I had the bits laid out in front of me - a set of instructions for each section of the hive, a bunch of nails, a big hammer and I was off. After about 2 hours of banging nails in and hitting various parts of my anatomy I had constructed 2 hives (what a clever lad I am).

To be honest it was very easy and enjoyable. We now had our 2 hives constructed and all I needed to do was make up the frames to go inside the hive. We had learnt how to do this in one of the lessons we had attended so no problems there. There are two types of frames we will be using brood frames (these stay in the brood box and are slightly deeper) and super frames (these go in the super box, on top of the brood box, and are used by the bees for storing honey).

  
                       
  These are all the bits that I received and had to put together as part of one hive
                       
 
                       
  The Roof - these photos show the before and after images when I was making the roof. The top is galvanised steel and has wooden sides to ensure that the hive is waterproofed
                                             
 
                                             
The Floor - This is placed at the bottom of the hive and the brood box goes on top of this. There is a removal piece at the front so that the bees can come and go as they please.   The Brood Box/Chamber - This is where frames are kept for the queen to lay eggs, larvae to hatch out and where some honey is stored.
                                             
 

This shows the layers of the beehive. The brood box contains the frames of wax foundation that the workers draw out for the queen to lay eggs in. The queen excluder goes on top so that the queen cannot go up into the super to lay eggs. The super will contain only honey that the bees are making as stores for the winter. This is the honey that we will take. The crown board goes on top of the super (the super is not pictured here) and then the roof goes on top.

When making these up you can sit in the comfort of your house watch TV and enjoy the smell of the wax foundation (sheets of wax with the shape of a honey comb impressed onto it) as you mount it into the frames. So both hives and the frames are made up all we needed now were the bees.