New Beehive Stand

The only area I have for the hives is in a very low wet area. Wet during the summer rains.

We built it high enough so flooding wouldn’t get into the “oil cups”. Some time within the next year we will get a  load of dirt, and fill in the area around the posts……..  giving me enough room to work the hives and be high and dry.

The height of the TBH is ok for working right now…but the “Church” hive will have at least 3-4 supers on it at some time in the future…not this year…so we have time to work on it.

We may frame it with landscaping timbers and then fill in the area. During Tropical Storm Fey we had almost a foot of water standing here. So…we need to build an island.  You can see my wetlands plants growing quite well and we’ve had very little rain lately. We sank the posts about 2’ and hit water on the way down.

The white cups and covers were put there to be filled with oil but you can see that even after being caulked it didn’t hold and leaked a small amount down the legs and onto the concrete. Cat litter cleaned it up. The day after I put the oil in I read a post on the Organic Beekeepers site where someone had good luck with petroleum jelly…so I used a small flat stick to put some inside of them.  I had a lot of big red ants get into the TBH (long one) and kill a number of bees.  I hope this solves that problem. It’s not strictly “organic”…and if I had strong hives I probably wouldn’t need it….but mine are just starting out and not strong enough to keep invaders like that at bay.  Maybe someday I’ll be able to forget putting vaseline in them but for now I am tweaking “organic” a bit.