Layens Hive Modifications

[Music] you know when it comes to the lands hive it's really hard to beat what seems to be close to perfection but there are a few little things that i think you might like to do with your lands hive that'll make your beekeeping experience even more fun so let me tell you about a couple things today that i've done that's a little different than the plan calls for and they're not huge things we're not reinventing the wheel here at all these are just little tweaks and some of those are even suggested by uh fedor lazutin in his book uh keeping bees with a smile and one of the things that for example that fedor mentioned doing if he were to ever modify his hive was to add an additional three inches of dead space below the frames so it's easily accomplished and by just doing one thing you can instead of using two two by tens you can use one two by ten and one two by twelve and all that does is create about two and a half three inches of extra dead space below the frames and all that's really for is just for air exchange uh especially during the winter so in wintertime the condensation buildup is is a problem uh good fresh air coming into the hive that's a real concern so that's just something that fedor lesuten mentioned in his book but i just want to let you know that that's one of the very first things that you can do another thing is if you look here you'll see that the entrance holes that i've cut are round holes instead of the half inch wide by or half inch tall by four inch wide slots either one works you have to think about bees for just a second you know when you think about in the wild bees will go in a crack in a circle and a square it doesn't matter as long as they can get in and the entrance is a decent enough size and the ones that i'm using are either an inch and a quarter or an inch and a half and the round holes for me and i i've noticed several other lands bee keepers doing this as well it seems to work a little bit easier than cutting that four inch slot with a router so unless you have a router table and those type of tools the round hole is a lot easier and you can just get the bits at the hardware store and they drill in and you've got a perfect hole in just a matter of seconds now i want to show you one thing real quick i cut the hole on the far side four inches from the end so four inches from that end four inches from here and the center hole if it's a 20 frame hive or larger you may actually have more than three holes but three holes is what they recommend for a lens hive that holds 20 frames and i just put one right in the center so another really cool thing that i like to do i like to use a nice stain on my beehives i i really like this one particular product that i'm going to show you this product is available on homedepot.com it's called eco wood treatment it's simply a dry mineral and if you were to open up the contents that's what you'll see is just this you'll get a little packet of dry mineral powder that you either mix with a gallon or five gallons of water depending on what size you buy and the nice thing about it is it's it's safe to use no matter what you can actually spray this on with just a pump sprayer mix it in the water put on with a pump sprayer and you can do it even when the bees are coming and going in your hive i don't usually do that but i have had to do it on occasion when i needed to get some beehives out to the yard before i even had time to stain them doesn't hurt them at all now if you get yourself one of these paint cans home depot does sell these they're a one gallon paint can you mix up that packet of mineral with a gallon of water just shake it up and you can take it into home depot and let them know that you bought this from them because it's only available on homedepot.com you can't get it in the store in fact i found that when i go to the store most people don't even know what i'm talking about it's a rare thing for anyone in the paint department to know about this but it is available on their website homedepot.com eco wood treatment mix it up bring it into home depot take it to the paint center after you've mixed it up and ask them to tint it and you can have it tinted in any of the water-based uh tints that they offer and it's free so i like to do that so that's what you see here if you don't use any of the tint you'll basically just get that aged weather patina look and some people love that so it just depends what your tastes are but for me i i like this one for now maybe next year i'll change my mind and i'll go with a different tint or i'll go to the patina but it's nice to have options isn't it so eco wood treatment the other thing you can do is you can also paint your hive and only paint and stain on the exterior of your hive so you don't need and shouldn't do any kind of painting or staining on the inside it's really not for the bees benefit at all so just do all that treatment on the outside to keep it lasting years and years now another neat feature that i i've personally done is i love to have the gabled roof i love the look of it it's very aesthetically pleasing but there's just a little bit more work but it's not that much more work a few things real quick i want to show you first off um the hardware that i use is just a simple um two inch narrow hinge fix pin and i get mine at ace hardware i've looked on amazon.com and you can get 10 packs but i found that they're really the same price at either home depot the big box stores lowe's and even ace hardware you really don't save any money at least i haven't found it yet by shopping at amazon.com so if you need hinges it seems like i need hinges like every other week i'm running the store i'm spending 10 20 bucks on hinges for these hives and at least i don't have to keep a stockpile of them i just grab them when i need them and that's what i use and i put them about seven inches from the end and i only use two and that seems to be all i need and i'm just going to give you a quick tour of the gabled roof system i really like this so much more over the flat top another thing that's a real good benefit is it also sheds the water sorry about all the dust on this hive it sheds water really well and i get my metal tops made you could probably make them but you're going to need 24 inch wide metal and it's a thick gauge and i don't have a micrometer so i really can't tell you what the gauge is but i can tell you that it's fairly sturdy much like a gutter so if you have seamless gutters on your house it's similar to the gauge that's used and maybe even just a little thicker and i get mine made at a place that that's what they do they do standing seam they do gutters and so forth and i told them that hey i'm making bee hives and i really want to have something nice on the roof a nice one sheet of metal so it's 24 inches wide and what they do for me is they just use their scrap so they have coils and when they get down to the last few feet of it you know it's just little custom stuff that they wind up doing so i come in and they give me a pretty good price to have this made and they bend it for me so there's no sharp edges and so i take these home and i just keep them handy and i'll show you one that i've got here so here's one that i've got just waiting for me to put onto a hive and you can see that they've they folded it over and it's just a piece of 24 inch aluminum and i really really like these and so they're super lightweight you're really not adding any poundage to your hive by using them and they just look fantastic sometimes you can even pick your color but me i go with the cheapest way i can go and it's whatever color they have that doesn't conduct heat so i don't go with dark colors too often if you do go with a dark color like maybe a dark green if you're able to get your hands on that that would look really cool on this it would look like a log cabin if it had a a rich red or green roof that would look really nice if you do get that just don't put it in direct sun because those dark colors do heat up quite a bit and and so i go with more of a neutral color just to be on the safe side because usually i never know if i'm going to have my hives in the shade or if i'm going to have them in partial sun or full sun so i go with these neutral colors and it works out well and i don't have to over think it now one thing that you always want to make sure of is when you put a hinge top on your hive you want to be able to open your hive from the back you never want to have your hive where it opens where the entrances are because you'll be standing at the entrance when you're working on your beehive and of course the bees will be flying into your leg or up your shorts or who knows what so you don't want that so you need to work on the other side and so when you open your hive you're always in back and then you can open it and work on it here so let's come around to this side and i'll show you a few more features about the roof so here's the back and this is where you'd be working and i have a latch here and these are just inexpensive latches that i use they cost i think two dollars for a two pack and that's all it's for and honestly i don't even know how necessary this thing really is but i put it on there anyway just in case there's ever high winds and when i put my roof on i just use four four screws right here these are roofing screws that are used for standing seam roofs and they have a little rubber or neoprene gasket and they work really well and you just need four you don't have to put screws up the whole one side and down the other it's it's not going to go anywhere so don't worry too much about that it's only function is to keep everything dry beneath it and it works just fine like this so let's open up and now you can see inside now my roof i'm going to show you here we're going to talk more about that so i'm going to give you some specs in just a minute but i want you to see here i use sometimes i piece together two pieces of wood that's what i did here so that i basically make it's it's a flat cover with the gable roof over it and i have a ventilation hole here this is a i think a two inch diameter hole and i have aluminum screen aluminum window screen i also have a ventilation hole on the bottom of the hive right here and that's again about a two and a half three inch diameter hole with aluminum window screen don't use the plastic screen because it can bugs can chew through that over time and it could even decompose over time the aluminum should last you several years if not the whole life of the hive itself i want to show you just another thing here too real quick here so i use these i use these screw eyes and make sure you use that doesn't have to be super heavy duty but don't use the the really really thin ones this is um this one is rated at holding 25 pounds so when i i have you know one here and one on the other side that's plenty so i got one up up top now if you want to you can use a chain right here but i like to use fence wire i think this is a i think it's 12 gauge just uh aluminum fence wire and might even be stainless steel i could be wrong on that it's probably stainless steel or something but it's just fence wire that they use for livestock and it works really well and it's lightweight it's not as pretty as a chain would be but it does the job and it's never gonna decompose or break and and it holds the wind really well so here you can be working in back of your beehive you can just pop the latch open your hive and your frames will all be in here i don't have any frames in this hive this is a nice way to just show you the volume you usually will use a follower board or a division board based on the size of the colony that you're working with and we're not really going to spend too much time on that in this video but just again more of the tweaks little things that i like about the hive or at least modification wise and here too now that i think dr leo's plan calls for i think a three inch not three inch three quarter inch piece of a three quarter thick pine that goes all the way around and it makes a lip ledge for your cover to sit on and i i just use like a inch and three quarters sometimes i'll use a two inch wide piece here because i want it to be enough meat on it for me to put my hinges in there so i use a little bit wider piece here and i think uh the plan on dr leo's site calls for a half inch from here to here i've got three quarters it's not the end of the world it's it's fine you can do a half inch if you want to uh that'll stick close to the plan but one real important thing that i should mention let me just make sure i can get my camera to this okay now let me show you something this is very important because wood swells and sometimes you'll if you make your cover i want to just show you something here so my my dimension right now i'm 34 inches right on the nose right here so what i did for my top or for my cover i made it 34 and a quarter okay so my cover is 1 8 of an inch bigger on both sides to accommodate for that swelling that sometimes happens and i believe i did the same thing this way so let me just measure all right i've got 16 and 5 8 and let me just see what my span here is yeah it's uh it's 17. so again it's got enough so that it'll never rub or stick it closes nice it does overlap just a little bit here i probably got uh you probably don't even have to make it an eighth both both ways you can probably just make it an eighth overall and that'll give you a 16th that's plenty i think so i got the whole quarter inch hanging off here but i never have to worry about the thing uh sticking or grabbing or have to fight to get the cover open so that's just another little thing that you'll probably like to do as well so you don't have to worry about it sticking on you here's what the roof looks like without the metal cover i'm going to tell you real quick the dimensions here now everything is just made with three-quarter pine okay both both and i've stained it i've also cut a three-quarter inch ventilation hole on both ends so it's kind of like an attic in your house and then depending where you live now i don't live in an area where there's a lot of snow but if you do you may have to put one more support here in the middle and i've done that for hives that i've shipped out to colder climates and this is a just a piece of one inch by three quarter inch brace that i put across and this is what i actually bring to my guys that make my metal tops i give them this and i just say make 10 or 15 or however many i think i'm gonna work on and then this is you can use you can use real thin wood right here if you want to this happens to be 3 8 thick i've used as thin as an eighth it doesn't really matter so much the thickness of this wood it's just whatever you have and the reason why that's not that big a deal is because when it comes time for winter your heat loss is going to be prevented by using cushions i'll show you over top of your frames so you'll use wool and let's just say this had frames in it so what i would do is i would put my pillow here like so and then once let's say you're you're winterizing your hive you put your pillow over the brood area and then you just simply close the hive and that's how you winterize your hive so the heat loss it's not so big a deal with this piece of wood here as it is with using wool or something that's going to slow down the loss of heat here so 3 3 8 is fine you know for the wood above the roof but again if you've got an eighth of an inch that's fine too you can lose use luanne something like that is totally acceptable all right let's talk a little bit about dimensions my gable that i make here again it's going to be about an eighth to a quarter inch wider than my hive and so this particular one and i do recommend that you cut a pattern mine is eighteen and a half wide four inches here eight and a half at the peak and then your width is always going to be a little bit wider than the width of your your hive itself so if your hive is 18 and a quarter wide here you're going to make this about an eighth of an inch to a quarter inch wider so mine is 18 and a half wide once you make one pattern you can make a million of these things and they always turn out great so just cut yourself a pattern and then keep that mark it don't use for or don't you know use for construction on another hive but save it now let's talk about frames for just a minute unfortunately there's nowhere that you can buy uh the frames well there is i shouldn't say there's nowhere you can't buy them but you can't buy them cheap and so a lot of times you have to resort to building your own and so it's not that hard to do and there's two versions of this one is i'll show you here you can use a you can use a planar jointer and you can make a very nice tapered edge you can start with the top being the same width as your top bar and then you can shave three sixteenths off of both sides and it tapers down nicely these look really great i really do like the way these look but for simplicity's sake you can also use a one inch wide straight cut piece that's three eighths thick i just take a piece of three quarter and i rip it in half so that basically i get three three-eighths thick wood it's just a little bit thinner than three-eighths by the time i rip it with the saw blade but i use the thin blade and i get most of the three-eighths on it so it's 3 8 thick by an inch wide and it's a straight piece no tapered edges and that's fine they they work fine in fact fedor lazutin uses the one inch wide straight arms side bars on his frames as well in the larger frames uh the lesuten style so on lands it's fine too you can do the same thing they don't look as nice but they're very functional and they work great too i do drill a hole because here's uh something real important that i you know a lot of a lot of folks like to use a full sheet of wax foundation and you can do that so because i like to let my bees draw all their comb from top to bottom i just use a starter strip and a starter strip can be made from either wax it can be made of plastic or it can be something as simple as a piece of wood and it goes in the top bar in the groove and so it's very important to know in advance the thickness of your starter strips before you cut the grooves in the center of your top bars so for me i just so happen to have a whole box of plastic foundation and i really don't want to use a full sheet of this i just want a straight guide for my bees to start on so what i do is i rip down after i've cut my top bars i rip them with a uh what is that that is i think it's a 3 16 wide groove down the middle and that's exactly what i need to put this piece of plastic with wax coating starter strip on it and so that'll sit in here and it's just an inch wide and that's all i give my bees sometimes i give them wax and sometimes i give them plastic but i never give them a full sheet of wax or plastic i only give them the starter strips and what's really cool too now is obviously these are deep frames and there's a little stability trick that you can do just by drilling a hole in the center right here on the side arms and i use you can use a dowel but i use bamboo skewers and i find out that they work great they're flexible and this is a 14 inch bamboo skewer that i just buy them on amazon.com and i think i get a pack of 120 or 114 and it's something like seven dollars and and they're 14 inches long so what i do is when i push them through they're about an eighth of an inch in diameter you don't sweat the diameter too much if you get it if you get your hands on an eighth inch diameter or 3 16 that's plenty you don't have to go crazy with it but it should be a nice snug fit like you see here i have to kind of push on a little bit and then because it's a bamboo skewer it's got a pointed end and i just take my pliers and once i push it through i just snip off that point and just make sure you face it away from yourself when you do that and now you've got your frame and you've got a little support here so as the bees draw their wax down they'll encounter that piece of bamboo skewer and it'll just give them more stability as they continue down the frame and it holds up really well in an extractor so if you do use an extractor for honey extracting i've got the um uh i i've got one where i can put several frames into the extractor and i can really crank it up and i never have had any of my wax the natural wax that the bees make never had it blow out so it works really well a lot of times i get asked what kind of glue do i use do i use any glue at all and the answer is i do and i use tight bond type on three is what i like to use for all of the construction of my beehive as well as my frames i do glue and staple my frames with an air stapler you can use nails if you want to but if you've got to make a lot of these things it's going to be way easier and quicker if you use an air stapler and the glue so this really keeps everything locked in place really well i have no complaints about the glue the nice thing about tight bond and i've heard this from other beekeepers is that it doesn't off gas it doesn't create a odor inside that the hive that the bees don't like a lot of times if you have that's why they tell you not to put stain or paint inside your beehive because a lot of times the bees won't like the smell of whatever it is they just want natural wood they want untreated lumber in fact if you can use rough cut lumber they like that even better because they like the texture and the surface is easy for them to crawl on versus one that's sanded very smooth so that's just something i figured i'd throw out to you but um so there you go you can get a full cut list from dr leo's website horizontal hive.com so all the lumber and and so forth has already been measured out and you can just use that site for reference if you like that's a really good resource so i do encourage you to go ahead and check that out here's something else too that i like to use and these are called entrance discs just google search entrance discs or even go on amazon's website do the same thing entrance disks you can get plastic or you can get stainless steel i prefer the stainless steel ones but they're expensive and so a lot of times what i'll do is i'll get the plastic ones or uh if i want to close off an entrance i use an unscented swiffer wipe that's all i have to do is put an unscented swiffer wipe in the holes that i don't want the bees to use as an entrance they can't chew it up like they could a paper towel or a piece of paper even tape for that matter they can chew through a lot of stuff it's surprising but they can't chew through unscented swiffer wipes so make sure you get the unscented ones and then just kind of squeeze them into the entrance holes or that you don't want them coming out of now the the entrance discs allow the bees either full access in or out or you can just have a on a ventilation setting or you can have it on a queen excluder setting i never use anything except for the full entrance or the um the ventilation so those are some really cool tips that i think you will enjoy incorporating into your own lens hive if you do let me know what you think i'd like to get your feedback so those are just a few things that i think enhance the near perfect lands hive it's it's just truly a great hive to work with and i think you're really going to enjoy incorporating some of these little modifications if you will that we've discussed here today again we didn't reinvent the wheel they're just little things that just sort of make the hive look a little more attractive the gabled roof is something i really love a lot and you can be so creative with these hives you can you can do way more than what i've shown you today as far as painting or staining and pudding design and artwork i've got some customers that have really made some beautiful paintings on their beehives so you want to enjoy beekeeping and that's what this is all about so i hope i hope that these things that we've talked about today will make the experience all that much more enjoyable for you so until next time friends enjoy [Music] beekeeping [Music] you

Channel: Enjoy Beekeeping

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Id: gNFPhKshJWk

Length: 28min 36sec (1716 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 30 2021