{"id":415,"date":"2010-09-08T10:02:28","date_gmt":"2010-09-08T15:02:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/linode.siwko.org\/wordpress\/?p=415"},"modified":"2010-09-08T10:02:28","modified_gmt":"2010-09-08T15:02:28","slug":"new-bottom-board","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.siwko.org\/wordpress\/?p=415","title":{"rendered":"New Bottom Board \/ Top Entrance"},"content":{"rendered":"

The hive has been infested with hive beetles for as long as I can remember and this summer the infestation has grown.\u00a0 I’ve been puzzling over this for some time to see whether there was anything I could do.\u00a0 I tried SHB traps with oil with little success.\u00a0 The beetles hide mostly in the cracks at the corners of the hive and at the end of the frames.\u00a0 They also hide in the corners of the inner cover and before I removed them, under the metal strips (rails) supporting the frames.<\/p>\n

The old bottom board that I was using had a huge gap between the boards with plenty of SHBs hiding in there.\u00a0 When I took it off, there were bees underneath, so it appears that the crack was wide enough for bees to walk in and out of the bottom.\u00a0 The bees were trying to gum it up with propolis.<\/p>\n

I have the idea that I’d like to build a better hive to eliminate SHB friendly crevices, but that’s going to take more thinking.<\/p>\n

While thinking about the SHB problem, I read the Bush Bees pages on top bar hives<\/a> and on top entrances<\/a>.\u00a0 I decided to go to a top entrance and to replace the bottom board with a cleaner, tighter bottom board.<\/p>\n

OK, so I didn’ t plan it quite that well.<\/p>\n

The first step was to build a new bottom board.\u00a0 I used a 2′ x 2′ plywood board with 1″ x 3″ strapping flat around the sides with 45 degree joints.\u00a0 Noah and the girls helped and it came out nicely.\u00a0 There was no place that I could see that a small hive beetle could hide.\u00a0 We installed the new board and noticed all the SHBs on the old board with all the bees underneath.<\/p>\n

This is when phase 2 of the plan became more obvious.\u00a0 I hadn’t planned for any entrance at all.\u00a0 The solution was to invert the old bottom board and put it on top of the hive with the old cover on top.\u00a0 The next day, we got another bit of plywood (conveniently sitting in the garage waiting) and mounted more 1″ x 3″ strapping, but this time perpendicularly.\u00a0 We then drilled three holes in the front board and mounted it on the top of the hive.\u00a0 The board was longer than a hive allowing for a overhang above the entrance.\u00a0 It strikes me that this is much more like the hive that was in my house a few years back.<\/p>\n

Here’s the result:<\/p>\n

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I put the branch and the wood strip there so that the bees would reorient.\u00a0 I don’t know whether it did any good, but I don’t think it did any harm.<\/p>\n

From bottom to top here’s how it stacks up:<\/p>\n