About a year ago I joined my local beekeeping association (Randalstown and District Beekeepers Association) and enrolled on a preliminary beekeeping course. I had fancied keeping bees for some time, and decided to "take the plunge". After all, how difficult could it be?
After completing the course and buying some beekeeping equipment (protective suit for me, and a hive for the bees) I bought some bees in May 2011 and installed them in their new home.
My first summer keeping bees was eventful to say the least!
I started off with two colonies. Within weeks I had lost the queen out of one and was getting into trouble. Being a glutton for punishment I bought a third nuc (nucleus) of bees and set up a third colony in case I lost one of my original two. About a month later I lost the queen out of this new colony as well.
I made various attempts at requeening my queenless colonies (some more successful than others) and eventually at the and of the summer had what I believed to be three full size colonies and a nuc which had a spare queen in it (just in case!).
The good news was that I did manage to harvest about 30 lbs of honey from one of my original two colonies. This was my "control" colony which I interfered with as little as possible, and it's the only one I got any honey from!
I fed all my colonies in September and October, and treated for Varroa. I fitted clear plastic crown boards to the hives, insulated the roofs and kept my fingers crossed that they would survive the winter. On the occasional very mild day I have lifted the roof off and had a quick look (without disturbing the crown board), and as far as I know, they are all still alive, although it has been over a month since I last looked.
So now I am looking forward to the spring time, and my first full season as a beekeeper. This year I hope to expand to about six colonies, and have a go at rearing a new queen or two if I can. However there's not much that can be done until the better weather. In the meantime I have decided that I probably need an extra hive or two, and I'm going to have a go at building my own from plywood.
Last summer I built a plywood hive (see photos below), but unfortunately I did not keep a record of exactly how I put it together!
This hive is built to the standard National dimensions and takes standard BS frames. The design is based on the commercially available cedar hives I have bought and it is compatible with commercially available National hive parts.
I hope to copy, and possibly improve upon the design of this hive and over the next few posts I'm going to go through in detail how to build it.
