When we consider the components of a bee hive it is perhaps normal to assume that the bees produce honey everywhere and that when I harvest the honey I take it from everywhere.
In actual fact this is not the case.
When a bee keeper harvests the honey from a hive he needs to make sure that he is only harvesting honey and not in fact killing a large portion of the future population of the colony, to do this the hive is split into two main pieces:
The Body - Where the bees live
The House - where they work for me
These are the translations of the French words, when I refer to a honey layer I'm speaking about the house.
The picture below shows the honey layer (actually the photo shows two honey layers stacked on top of each other).
The honey layer 'works' because in between this layer and the body there is a plastic grill, the holes in this grill are large enough for a worker bee or drone to pass through but not quite large enough for the queen to pass through – this then has the effect of ensuring that the bees can build and fill the honey layer but the queen is unable to pass into and therefore lays eggs in this section of the hive.
But how do we make one of these layers – and why?
The why is perhaps the easy bit – cost, it's cheaper to make them then to buy them (and you also know exactly what's in them - so you can make sure that there are no glues or anything else that you don't really want).
So lets have a look. The following is a photo shoot in my workshop (please excuse the mess, it gets a bit cluttered when I start 'building stuff').
As you can see I start with a selection of wooden boards (carefully layed out LOL).
The boards need a few pieces adding to them before I can nail them together.
The flat piece that is running across the wood is a guide for the tops of the honey frames, it is there to make sure that the frames stay evenly spaced.
Once I have nailed the top guide pieces in place I need to fix the bottom guide pins in place, these are quite sturdy and so the wood needs to be drilled before I can hammer them in.
Once in place these guide pins will make sure that the bottoms of the honey frames can't move more than a couple of millimeters, this then ensures that I don't crush bees accidentally when moving the frames or removing frames.
Once those pieces of metal work are inserted I can join the pieces together, I do this using big nails (I'm using big nails as I do not wish to introduce any chemical contamination, from glues for example, to the inside of the box).
The image below shows what they look like when nailed together.
At this point the boxes are all the same size and will stack nicely – however, they wont take any impact without sliding over each other and so the last thing I need to do is add an overlap section (as shown below).
This section gives the honey layer about 20mm of overlap, so it's pretty hard to have an accident with one sliding over the other.
Now that the things are complete there remains only the task of painting them.
I paint them with a pretty neutral stain, this serves to weather proof the exterior of the honey layer – the bees will look after the inside but obviously damp or rot might make it's way in from the outside if I don't protect the wood. The painted layer was shown in the first image (at the top).
So that's it, a honey layers built and ready.
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