Building New Hive Bodies

We seem to always be growing. More and more hive bodies are needed to sustain the growth of our new hives. Spring is a time to build and splitting hives is critical to the growth and sustaining strong hives. But this all take tons of materials. For the last 2 weeks we have been planning dozens of boards to prepare for our long build out process.

We recent bought a load of rough wood from a mill in Kamas. The price is right, but it requires a lot of work to get them ready to build.

Here you can see we had to move up to a 20″ industrial size planer to get the job done. The 3 truckloads of saw dust was donated to some horse farms to help with the stalls.

Once we have the boards planed, we then will cut, size, router dove tails, glue and staple each box.

It seems like we handle these boards about 10 times before they are done.

Once we assemble, then they go into the priming and painting stage.

Then the final step is to stencil the Bluebox Honey name.

But we are not done yet. The 10 frames needed per box is the final step.

The last step is to load them up on the truck and get them out to the bee yard so they can build out comb and have room to grow from one box to two. This process will be repeated to also add hive bodies for honey production.

One full week, 12 hour days to get it all done.