Strout Double Deep Frames 2.0 Overview and Construction

welcome back to the channel everyone it's great to have you here my name is david but my girlfriend thinks that i should go by b guy dave so maybe i'll try that out anyways in this video i want to go over these double deep frames this is an idea that i came up with last year and it works really well in my new hive design and essentially what it is is two langstroth deep frames that utilize a sliding dovetail so that they can be split apart when it comes time for honey harvest but before i get too much into the nitty-gritty about these kind of frames and i'm actually going to go into detail about how to make these later in the video i want to talk about why we use frames in the first place now beekeeping is a practice that dates way back into ancient times there are actually cave drawings found in spain from about 9000 bce that depict a man hunting for wild honey and this is long before bees have ever been domesticated and we kind of just scavenged for the honey and then in about 2500 bce is the first documented case of domesticated bees in egypt and it's hypothesized that china domesticated bees even before that so beekeeping has been around for a very long time but before frames were invented the only way to harvest honey was to destroy the hive and they would go in and cut down all the comb and it's very destructive and really not good for the bees at all so in 1851 lorenzo langstroth developed the langstroth hive and it's one of the most popular hive designs out there today he actually lived in massachusetts where i am right now which is pretty neat but he developed these langstroth frames is what they're known as and these are all over the world the brilliant concept that reverend langstroth came up with was this idea of b space and you may have heard of this before it essentially states that any space in the hive under about a quarter of an inch the bees will fill with propolis and then any space above roughly half an inch the bees will fill with honeycomb and so that leaves this gap of which bees will comfortably live reverend langstroth designed his hive around this idea of b space and created frames that would space the comb apart by about 3 8 of an inch which is that perfect b space and this allowed a comb to be built in nice orderly rows and allows you to remove the comb for honey harvest but also to perform hive inspections and it's really easy to check for disease and pests and being able to check for disease is super important these days it's actually in the massachusetts general laws chapter 128 section 33 i looked this up because i wanted to know it states no person shall knowingly maintain a colony or colonies of honeybees in hives other receptacles trees or other lodging places in which brood combs are fastened to the container of the colony or cross built so essentially what that means is you have to have removable frames in your hive langstroth's frames were such a good idea that they literally turned it into a law now i built this model of a langstroth deep frame this is pretty standard dimensions of what you'll find out there and there are a couple things about this frame design that aren't quite ideal for someone who makes their own hive or has a backyard shop the first being that some of these cuts are rather intricate there are these stopped cuts on the side bars there are some tricky dado cuts or rabbit cuts i should say on these top bars and overall i think they're very beefy you know they're they're definitely not going to break which is a good thing but they use a little bit more material than i think they need to the second drawback with this design is this is the deepest frame that you can find for a langstroth hive and it only measures about eight and a half inches it only measures about eight inches of actual cone building vertical capacity this may not matter if you live in a warm climate but if you live in a cold climate like i do here in massachusetts when bees cluster their cluster can actually get up to 12 or even 14 inches in diameter and that just won't work with an eight-inch comb and so these frames end up being a little too short to overwinter effectively so most beekeepers around here actually have two levels of these but then there's an air gap where there is no comb and that inhibits bees as they move up and down in the hive so this frame well it's really great for a lot of situations and a lot of beekeepers isn't quite what i'm looking for because it's not very good at overwintering bees since a langstroth frame is a little bit too shallow why don't you just increase the depth so i have here the same width the same thickness these frames hold each other about 1 3 8 inches apart which leaves about an inch for the comb and about 3 8 of an inch for the b space but this frame has about 17 inches of comb depth the bees will build their comb right around this center dowel and that allows plenty of room for overwintering colonies and they'll spread out along the frames and have a nice big cluster as they consume their honey stores they'll work their way upwards and 17 inches is plenty for this climate here in massachusetts this is a great frame these do get heavy if they are fully laid with honey but since you're only picking up one of these as opposed to a box of eight or ten of these langstroth thieves you know the weight isn't that big of a deal at least for me the only drawback with this type of design is that you cannot put this in a honey extractor there's no way that any honey extractor you buy off the market at least in the united states is gonna fit a frame with these dimensions it's just too big so you could cut the comb and strain it but that's wasteful comb is very very valuable to the bees it takes about eight pounds of honey to make one pound of wax so they really have to work hard and use a lot of their resources to build that wax so i want to preserve as much of that hard work as possible which is why last year i came up with my first double deep design and that is this guy right here it features removable halves so that each half can be put in a standard honey extractor each of these is the equivalent of the langstroth frame so these are fully compatible with honey extractors out there and i really like this design and it's actually what i have in my backyard right now working quite well but there are certainly some improvements that can be made on this design first of all i think i over complicated this a little bit i made the top i'm calling this the hanger removal because i wanted both the top and the bottom frames to be interchangeable and that way you could put a frame from the bottom to the top and vice versa but what i've come to realize is that's not uh that's not super helpful there are only a few cases in which you want to do that and honestly when you're out on the hive and there are bees buzzing all around the last thing you want to do is pull these apart and disturb all those bees just to flip the orientation so that aspect i can get rid of on this new design and then secondly it's just a bit chunky it's kind of similar to these to these langstroth frames where i wanted them to not break and be very durable but at the same time i think i went a little overboard and it leaves about an inch and a half of wood on this middle section that's a space that the bees can't build their comb and it really prevents those bees from having free range over this entire area which is what i want because i want them to be able to cluster in the winter for these hives having said all that i have come up with my new design which is this guy right here the double deep 2.0 it features once again two frames both the equivalent of a langstroth deep frame when you put them together they slide on nicely like that this dimension is much thinner it's only about what is it only about three quarters of an inch now as opposed to an inch and a half and yet it retains a lot of the rigidity that was in that old design i do not think these will break i've also simplified the joinery on a lot of these i don't want to make intricate cuts i know i've explained that in other videos but this i think is going to work out really well i've got grommet holes so i can put wires in i've got grooves in the top i plan to put in starter strips i don't use foundation but if you were to use foundation you could easily slot that in here and work out fine the dimensions are the same as a length drop frame so a langstroth deep foundation would work really well the other changes i now have a permanent top and a permanent bottom so i can no longer flip them but you know that doesn't really matter to me i'm going to be happy with how the bees decide to allocate their resources they i think they know best and then one last change that i made is instead of having slots in the hive to space the frames apart these frames are actually self-aligning so these top bars butt up against each other and then i have these spacer pieces down below that will hold these frames at the perfect 3 8 of an inch spacing providing adequate b space and allowing the bees to to move freely while building the comb as designed so i think this is a very elegant solution the joints are simple the cuts are easy now i won't sugarcoat it these frames take a while to make i spent several hours making just the 25 i need for one hive and it was truly a labor of love you know there are a lot of joints on this there are twice as many joints as a standard length straw frame granted you're getting uh twice the comb capacity but you can't buy these so you kind of have to put the time in if you want to use them and i i think they came out well the only real challenge is setting up and cutting this dovetail accurately you want somewhat of a loose fit when you're in the shop because once you put these in the hive all that moisture in there is going to make the wood swell so you want a little bit of slop when you make these in the shop and that way when they swell in the hive they're going to be a nice fit i hope you've enjoyed this brief overview of kind of the progression of how i got to this design if you have questions please let me know but i also want to show you how i actually made these i have plans available for sale on my website but the actual procedure i think can be helpful to go over so let's make some sawdust [Music] [Music] mm-hmm now the next step with these sidebar pieces is an optional one but i'm going to go ahead and do it and that is to drill holes for grommets this is only necessary if you're going to wire your frames i probably won't wire all of mine but i want to have the option to so i'm going to do that now the hole you drill will really depend on what size grommets you have mine work out i'm drilling a hole about 0.1 inches in diameter i've listed on the plans for an eighth of an inch but just know that you should size that to whatever grommets you have and it's really convenient to do this step now because you can get all of the frames that we're gonna cut out of this one block and to do this i've clamped on this fence to the drill press put in these two lines and i can register the end of the block with these two lines this way flip the block and then do the other two and i have to do it from both sides because this bit isn't long enough to go all the way through even though it's a little time consuming now it's going to be way more time efficient to do that now than drill each side bar individually so now that i've got all of the holes drilled for the little wiring grommets i can go ahead and cut the slots in the top and bottom of these blanks and then you can probably see where i'm going uh we can then rip thin strips and get our individual sidebars that way so i've actually gone and i'm using my plans uh these plans are available on my website if you're interested so i'm not gonna go into too many dimensions uh in this video i just want to go over the techniques i'm using to actually make these parts um so i've built this jig this nifty little jig that rides on the fence of my table saw and this will allow me to safely hold these blanks as i run them over a dado blade and i've set this the width of that dado stack to three quarters of an inch and there's a lot of setup here so i'm going very slowly and using a test piece i've got my calipers because i want to make sure that that dado stack is cutting directly in the middle of this blank that it's the perfect width and that i'm cutting to the perfect depth and that way i can make one pass for each of these moving forward now i am pretty happy with the way i designed these frames all of them get the same slots cut into the top and bottom no matter if they're for the top frame or the bottom frame [Music] so [Music] so [Music] so and that is how you make just over 100 sidebars in a couple hours of work now obviously not all of these will be ideal to use a couple will have knots or splits in them so i always like to make a few extra but now i've got all my sidebars ready to go and they all have holes drilled in them they've all got the slots i'm super happy in the way i was able to do those processes early on and that way i don't have to make each one of these individually which would just be a nightmare and neuron impossible so the next step is to start making those cross pieces at the top and the bottom bars and then the hanger on top and that's when we'll get into some of the dovetail work so let's do that next so to make the rest of the pieces for these frames i'm going to be using this 1 by 12 piece of pine i've gone with a rough sawn board simply because it's about half the price as a finished board it's about eight feet long and i can get all the pieces i need to make 25 frames which works out really well because that's what a hive holds but this board does come with some texture on both sides so we're going to plane that out just as i did with the sidebars but one thing i wanted to mention is since this board is a little bit of a lesser quality you want to really take time and find one that doesn't have many knots and isn't very bowed or warped that's going to save you a lot of hassle when you're actually milling up these pieces the actual milling is pretty boring we're just cutting out rectangles we'll come back to do the actual dovetailing for the the top and bottom bars because that's the exciting part so i just finished cutting up all of the horizontal pieces for all the frames i have a few extra you at least need 25 quarter inch thick pieces and 75 half inch thick pieces and i basically made those by taking that pine board running it through the planer until it fit well into the side bars that i had cut previously and then i could cut the cut sections to length and then rip all the pieces i need on the table saw so i've got all my parts here ready to go and i'm now gonna set up to cut the dovetails for the sliding dovetail um top and bottom bars so i've got a 14 inch degree dovetail bit this bit is slightly special most dovetail bits you'll find are only seven degrees so this one flares a bit more than usual and that just helps prevent the frames from slipping down since i'm going to be cutting a loose dovetail joint anyways i don't want there to be much vertical slop and i will mention that i'm cutting a loose dovetail because beehives are very moist places and so this wood will swell with the moisture that the bees produce and i don't want these dovetail joints seizing up on me so we're going to set up this router table with my dovetail bit and then we'll get to cutting those [Music] dovetails [Music] [Applause] i now have all of the pieces and i can start assembling these frames now i want to point out how these dovetails fit because the fit's pretty important you don't want them too tight because as the wood swells with moisture it's going to expand and this joint is going to get tighter so i like a nice loose fit but you don't want them to be able to pull apart a whole lot because that presents its own challenges and mites can get in there and hide and small hive beetles and such so i've got a nice slip fit there's not much slop but they slide nicely and you can see there's only three quarters of an inch for the bees to traverse between the frame so that's a lot better than the inch and a quarter i had in my previous design i also want to show off that i cut two small grooves this is for the top bar and this is for the dovetail top bar i cut little slots and that's for putting foundation in or i'm not a foundation user so i'll be putting starter strips in there but these are an eighth of an inch wide eighth of an inch deep i can cut a strip coat it with wax and glue it really easily in here so that's gonna keep everything nice and centered and make things super easy but i'm excited i've got all these pieces now off camera i cut the top hangers um these are gonna be what the the frame hangs from and also forms the roof of the hive there's no gap in between these hangers they're gonna butt up right against each other so i'm excited to have all these pieces ready to go and now i'm gonna start the assembly of them i've got a small pin nailer here some 18 gauge inch and a quarter little brad nails these are a little bit long you could probably get away with something shorter probably an inch would be ideal but these are going to work out fine i've got all my pieces within easy reach i can just grab so i'm going to glue these together and use these pin nails just to hold them while the glue dries the glue will be what gives the most strength to these joints so these pin nails aren't exactly structural they're there just to hold these frames as the glue dry so keeping that in mind it's pretty assembly line process i'm just going to start cranking these out soon enough we'll have 25 frames let's do it [Music] well that just about brings us to the end of the build on these double deep frames i've got a nice stack of them over here to the side a 25 free to go in a brand new hive that i'll be building next i did add a few more things that i wanted to point out i put on these little spacer blocks on the bottom frame section and that's just to help maintain that b space a nice 3 8 of an inch in between each frame i also added the top bar the hanger obviously just with a few brad nails and some glue and the last thing i added was two starter strips since i don't use foundation these are wax coated pieces of wood that i simply glued in there and they'll help encourage the bees to start building their comb in the middle of the frame as opposed to wonky you know in between cross comb all that jazz i hope you found this video interesting maybe you learned something or maybe you're just curious about what i was up to with these wacky looking frames and if you just like the video or are interested in my build i hope you'll consider subscribing i plan on releasing a video soon detailing the full hive and that build as well but that's kind of all i have to say on frames and these double deep frames so until next time happy beekeeping and i'll see you in the next one

Channel: David Strout

Views: 8,306

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Id: Ez72KJfgYLo

Length: 23min 4sec (1384 seconds)

Published: Thu May 06 2021