🔵Building a 5 frame nuc for JUST $4!!!!

hi I'm Cayman Reynolds and in this video I'm going to show you how you can save a lot of money by building your own Phi frame nuke boxes there's so many things you can do with the five frame nuke overwinter them use them for mating nukes and there's a couple cool things in that regard and you can you know stack multiple colonies on as some people use them exclusively for colonies they're really handy to have and if you are a hobby beekeeper I think a five frame nuke is one of the handiest things you can have in the bee yard I'm going to show you the measurements on this and also some things you got to watch out for when you're building it and when you are using them in your BR there's a few things that people mainly don't know and they scratch their heads when it happens I'll let you know that at the end of video and then I'm let's see let's go through the joints real quick because I'm building this in a way that anybody who has just a basic table saw can make it you got to be able to make accurate accurate cuts but you don't have to have any fancy tools now if you can make a joint like this box joint or finger joint that's fantastic that's what you most of the most of the time you will get from a commercial beekeeping manufacturing company however you don't need that you really don't and there are ways that you can make these strong enough without it now over here we have a rabbet joint on this by frame medium nuke and basically what it is if you take a section of wood and you take a stacked blade or you can use routers I'm a date offset and you cut a big swath of wood out of there and you can just you know but this up you know nail it to it this one wasn't made for these two boards but that's basically the principle is how the rabbet joint works and that works very well now when you are building these five friend nuke classes you have to make sure that a few things are addressed the number one is that the spacing is correct I mean doesn't have to be exactly perfect but it needs to be to where you can get frames in and out because that's one of the things that a grits bees the most when you build your own equipment and you're having a prior really hard or you're crushing bees against the wall or against the bottom or against the lid sometimes you can't help but accidentally squash your being especially when the colonies are really large we try not to but it happens but when you have equipment that's like that that just really miss shape and it can cause a lot of issues and make the bees angry and make you a little angry too so let's not do that I'll give you the measurements here in one second let's run through a couple of things really quick so again we just have plywood I prefer solid wood but you can definitely make these for like four bucks using plywood easily and if you you're able to source something from a buddy of yours who has a construction company or you have one oh man you can make these things for a song now we've got our deep frames in here you can also use these for swarm traps though the biggest swarms might ignore this small of a cavity size but there's no reason you can't stack one on top of the other and then just strap them together and have two stories that would work very well now many people are probably wondering why I have this entrance here I love the fact that this design that I've used in the past and have right now has a solid bottom it makes it very easy to be able to just you know haul it off now there is a device I don't have it yet but I'm going to be using that for this and I'll show you when I get it I'm gonna leave that in the comments and linked below if you want to check that out but basically you can get at any supply company but it acts to where you can close this or open it at any time will reduce the entrance down that makes it really handy now one thing you've got to watch out for with nucleus colonies is heat and this is all colonies but especially with five frame nukes they go from you barely filling these boxes a lot of times to you know just blowing them up so to speak and on hot summer days your bees will abscond if they don't get enough ventilation this hole right here is great you can put a screen on the bottom somewhere or the whole bottom if you if you'd like I don't like having it separate because these make great matey nukes or if you're making splits you can just transport them easy you want to worry about that whole bottom coming off so I make them a little bit deeper I'll give you the measurements on that here in just one second it does make it a little bit heavier perhaps and not really and you know the bees work really well with just a hole like that they do great with it actually it kind of surprised me the first time I tried it about twelve or so years ago and the bees are really good if they're good bee is about pulling out the dead bees if you have a random dead bee in there and debris and just pulling out that entrance and what do you think they do in a tree right so one thing also if you haven't watched our videos on Queen rearing check them out I'm going to leave them up here because we do in the videos with a fire frame nuke and they are awesome cells and great Queens so I think just for that reason you should have a couple of these things lying around alright so to get to the measurements and billing and all that first I want to talk about this hole right here it's a one and a half inch hole you can make it smaller than that that's why I'm going to put that little device on the front and I'll show you that later but when you're drilling those holes you want to start [Music] and once you have a little bit of a hole like this you're going to go all the way and go to the other side and then drill through it because if you just go all the way through one side it's going to rip a bunch of the plywood material the bees really won't care that much because it'll just propel eyes them the chunks that come off but that really helps me a lot now another thing with these five frame news these frame rests they're the only hard part about them and again if you have a stack set that's fantastic but what you've got to do is get your saw set up to where it will slice it down the right to the right measurement and then you're going to cut it in this way I'm going to have a video right after this one addressing this and it'll be a short little video just talking about how you can cut it like that it's really not that hard once you get things set up it works great it's cheap so you don't have any special equipment but anybody can do it if you've got access to somebody's table saw or your home just be careful of course all this equipment if if you handle it properly is safe but if you don't yeah I don't want to hear about losing fingers and all that kind of stuff alright let's get to the measurements so all we have you know on this side it's real basic is we have 20 inches by ten and a half so we have two pieces that are 20 inches by ten and a half that's not that hard to do just make sure your boxes are square use a square make sure everything is square or you're gonna have rock in your boxes when they get on top of each other aren't going to fit quite right most people forget to square up their equipment and just don't assume because you purchased it from a company that they have a square and a lot of the stuff they do but I've gotten some stuff before that was not square and find out after you cut it and measure twice cut once all that kind of stuff now this is 3/4 inch CDX again I prefer solid wood but this works very well if you seal it you really have got to seal these things now I'm gonna be whack slipping this box that makes a big difference if you're not waxed dipping I highly suggest before you put everything together and assemble it that you paint the insides or seal it with something I know it's a pain in the rear end but these things will last so much longer that's where they're gonna rise is up in here they're gonna rot in any place that moisture can get to and start swelling and expanding this stuff it's gonna start degrading it all it takes is a little bit of exposed wood and your box starts having issues especially if it's plywood you want to watch out for that so we'll be filling this with Mac's dip and stuff we'll be doing a video on that before too long so that's that piece right there now typically your middle piece the one that has the frame rest is not going to be this skinny but because we didn't want to have to do any joints over here and just keep it simple it's pretty narrow and it is just seven and a half inches and also ten and a half inches so any of my boxes aren't completely perfect they might be 1/32 of an inch off a little bit but that's alright now the handle is you can pretty much do whatever you want I'm not really a big fan of these cause Cove handles they're such a pain in the rear in you know this one's actually a nice one some of them aren't that thick or deep into the wood but the problem is the deeper it is into the wood the the weak of the box the more heat wash you have there and a lot of them you get them in it's just like oh my goodness there's like a quarter inch you can get your fingers into and you've got in fact thumbs like I do and then you have it full of honey it becomes a lot more stressful on you than it should be now as far as the frame rests depth we have 3/8 of an inch because this is all 3/4 inch stock so we cut halfway into it so it's 3/8 of an inch this away and then as far as depth we have 3/4 of an inch so 3/4 of an inch by 3/8 pretty easy stuff now that the bottom of course you just you know put a bottom on the boxes I put multiple pieces you'll see that here just a bunch of scrap pieces I had now you can have a nice fancy bottom doesn't have to be this thick if you have thinner material again the most important thing is that you keep the integrity of your wood solid by sealing it it's so so important so basically you just got 20 inches by the width which would be 9 inches wide so with these sides together it's 9 inches wide total and it fits this box right here pretty well it's not perfect but it definitely will do the job just fine you can overwinter these 5-game nucleus counties now the hint again the handles you can do whatever you like I really like exterior handles you can put them on the side the boxes that I've built in the past we only put them on the front in the back and that's kind of with a purpose it's because you can only grab them this way and this is really the best way to grab your equipment if you're holding it like this especially if it's got honey I mean just think of all that weight you have away from it's really hard on your back like that it's so much easier like this and just keep that in mind now let me see what I covered every that I talked about the heat in the abscond and right then and I covered that yeah the I did cover that so you've got to seal everything I showed you how to drill the hole we'll be covering how to cut the frame rest in a short probably 2 maybe 3 minute video I'll try to have that up in the next day maybe two days and the joints so there's really not a whole lot to it we're going to be showing you how to do so many things with these five frame nukes they're so cheap to build and I know we didn't cut it in front of the video like some people probably wanted but the thing of it is if I set everything that I felt like I needed to say and then cut it we'd have a 30 minute video and you know it's not time for dinner and I've been out here putting this thing together but they really don't take that long especially once you get one down you can kind of get a you know you the measurements are a piece of cake so once you get a thing going think got a good table salt man you can just go to town on these things and in one day you can have a lot of these put together but again still them definitely do it L by the way don't forget to assemble them really well everything's been glued and then there's staples now if I didn't have glue or didn't want to use glue use screws you don't have the joints you need all the strength that you can get by promise you between the staples and that that glue this is really tough and I did screw the handles in here but that's it so there's not a whole lot to it five frame nukes are really handy and I highly suggest if you even if you just have two or three hives and that's all you want to stay at I would still have a couple of these boxes handy because you never know when your beads are going to swarm you never know when you might lose a queen or something so if you made your own little split and had yourself an extra queen kind of in your back pocket then you know if emergency happens you have a colony a little county that's ready to just plug right in kind of like we did in that video in December so I'll leave that up here as well because we very clean that colony in winter which is pretty cool but you definitely can't go wrong having a couple extra little colonies around mating Queens and these things so so handy thanks for watching our videos if you have any comments or questions or if I missed anything leave them below

Channel: Kamon Reynolds - Tennessee's Bees

Views: 128,646

Keywords: beekeeping, beekeeper, honeybees, bees, Kamon Reynolds, honey, how to make honey, Tennessee beekeeping, Tennessee beekeepers, swarm, swarm control, swarmtrap, swarm trapping, how to make a swarm trap, swarm trap, beekeeping for beginners, beekeeping for dummies, beekeeping 101 youtube, beekeeping 101, 5 frame nuc box plans, 5 frame nuc box, 5 frame nucs, building bee equipment, beekeeping equipment, double nucleus colony, mating nucs, Bee equipment cheap, cheap beekeeping

Id: jiHWTLTsHK8

Length: 13min 55sec (835 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 19 2020