well a couple of weeks ago - my friends are telling me how they're gonna start keeping bees and I thought yeah that sounds really cool I want to do that and then they told me how much they're paying for their beehives and all their fee equipment and I was like holy cow no I'm not gonna I'm gonna do that risa a lot of money it's almost embarrassing and I don't even want to tell you how much they're spending because there's really no guarantee that you're gonna make any honey or the bees are even going to live a season so anyway I decided I'd build my own hive and I decided to build what's referred to as a Kenyan style top bar hive and the main reason for that is apparently it's more be friendly and also you produce more beeswax and I use beeswax in my artwork that's a medium referred to as encaustic but it's primarily E's wax so with this high my main goal is really not to spend a lot of money on the project so I'm going to build the bulk of the hive with an old Formica countertop that I salvaged off of a job a few years ago and it's just been hanging out the chef so let's go ahead and get started well I've got a few of my parts and you know you can build these things a lot of different ways and one of the things that I really wanted in my design was a viewing window so what I decided to do was make two end pieces so basically making the hide and then I'll attach it to the front which will be sort of like the traditional 15 by 12 size but I wanted to have these end pieces to build off of for the window to find the angles for the end pieces I started with a square that measures 13 inches by 12 inches I've measured in three quarters or three and three quarters of an inch on each side at the bottom and now I'm going to use a straight edge and go from zero at the top of the corner of the the square here and at that line and then I'll just draw a line I'll use the sliding compound miter saw to cut along the line and it turns out that it's right around a 17 degree angle before I attach the ends and start to build the high I'm going to trace them on another piece of plywood because I'll need to follower boards [Applause] most people don't cut an angle at the top and bottom of the hide to match the angle at the ends but I'm going to because I think it might make it a little bit easier to fit the door at the bottom I'll touch the sides to the back with a little wood glue few nails and some screws the nails will help to hold the parts in place but the real structural strength will come from the screws well I think before I start working on the back of the high that's going to have the viewing window I'm going to drill the entrance holes and so I've taken a look online it looks like the center of the hive up two inches from the bottom and then out four inches on either side of the center now I'm moving on to the window and the way I'm going to go about it is attach a board at the bottom and the top and I've got the seventeen degree angle at the bottom in the top and I'm going to notch out a little bit here and a little bit here and fill this area with Plexiglas so the next step is to bring this over to the table saw and cut a little notch in the top board and the bottom I'll take a measurement for the Plexiglas window and it looks like it's about five and three-quarters I'll use the table saw to cut the Plexiglas but I'm going to turn the table saw blade around first and that should help to prevent chipping and give me a cleaner cup I sanded the edges of the Plexiglas just going in about 3/4 of an inch to get a better adhesion with the adhesive clock I want to try and clamp this Plexiglas down and get a nice tight scene while the adhesive clock sets up so I've taken a piece of quarter-inch plywood which is a little bit smaller than the notch and I'll put this in place and then I'm going to put a few pieces of half-inch plywood and screw them in to the sides of the hive and I don't act kind of like a sprinkler [Applause] all right well it's a new day and I'm moving on to the screen for the bottom of the hide and I think you're supposed to use around eighth inch screen but I couldn't find any of the hardware store so I bought quarter-inch gutter screen and I'll double it up and just shift it a little bit and that should give me about an eighth of an inch gap that's having a bit of a hard time lining up the gutter screening no matter how many times I try I just look the difference at this end of the hive but by the time I got over here the screening would line up exactly giving me a quarter inch hole so luckily I had a little bit of metal screen so I got a bit of the second coat of gutter screening and just put the metal screening over it and I think that should be good enough I've got another one of these odd pieces of plywood here in the shop and I'm going to use this to make the door for the bottom of the hide you need to close the hive up during the winter so the beach day warmer and hopefully make it through the winter and I'll have enough here to make a door for the window in hi the next step is to hinge the door for the window in the hive and I'll have to trim it down a little bit I had to do the same thing with the door at the bottom of the hive I just finished putting the legs on the one side of the beehive basically I wanted to figure out exactly what I was doing before I tried to film any of it so now I'll turn the Beehive around and we'll put the legs on the other side I'm using a few old two-by-fours for the legs and I'm cutting them at 34 and a quarter inches and that's from the long point to the short point and the angle is 22 degrees I cut my first leg and then I used that leg to mark all the cuts for the other three legs I added this cleat to the side of the Beehive and I put this there to hold the top and I've marked a line at the center which is seven and a half I'm using two two-inch long screws to hold the leg in place while I drill through the top of the leg with a 3/8 inch drill bit and now I'll hammer a four inch long carriage bolt through the hole add a washer and a nut now I can remove the clamp and drill a hole through the bottom of the leg on the bottom of the leg I'll only need a three inch carriage bolt because I'm not going through double-thickness plywood I'm just going through the outside edge here well I'm almost there but there's still a couple things I need to do and one is to build the top for the hide and the next is probably the most important thing and that's the top bars and that's what the bees will build their brood nest on and the honey combs on now apparently the logic is that the brood nest top bars need to be an inch and a quarter and then the bars that the bees build their honeycomb on need to be an inch and a half so I guess the next step is to rip a few pieces of pine for the top bars just about halfway through and building all the bars and the first step was to rip the bars at an inch and a half and an inch and a quarter I think Ross cut the bars at 17 inches and then I rip some molding half of an inch it just took some scrap pine ripped it out half of an inch set the saw blade to 30 degrees and then set the plan through twice giving the piece of molding this nice little point and that's what the bees are going to build their cone waffle now the next thing was something that I haven't seen done before but I it just made sense to me I added a little block to the end of the bars and that will keep the bar from shifting on top of the hot I made this jig to help me Center the piece of molding on the center of the bar and also to give me even spacing between the end of the molding and the block I finished making all the bars and now I'm going to put beeswax on the bars and that does two things really the bees need that wax to start building their comb from and also it gives the hi the familiar smell and the bees are less likely to leave now this whole setup here it's definitely a little bit over the top but I've been thinking about I really want to do it's a piece of aluminum that I wrapped around the stick and it creates this trough to hold the molten beeswax now I think is gonna work pretty good this is great it's working a lot better than I even expected the only modification I had to do was put two pieces of wood on the griddle because the trunk was opening up because it's just aluminum foil but so far I'm almost done with all of the bars and I think I've been working at it for not more than five minutes I finished up with all the top bars and now I'm ready to move on to the roof but I'm sure some of you are a little concerned about the idea using a griddle and beeswax or wood shop you know just being real careful the griddle is on warm it's just about 180 degrees and same thing with the boiling pot there and now that I finished with the work I'll bring the tools outside let them cool off and then I'll put them in storage so yeah it's something to be concerned about but just work smart I'm using a 1 by 6 bore the ends of my roof and I'll trace the top of the top bar and I want to make sure that when I draw my roof line I don't go below the top at the top bar I'll measure the center which is 10 and use a straightedge to connect the lines I'll transfer the angle onto the fascia board and make this cut with the table saw and I'll just check it real quick and make sure it fits the way I think it will and and that's good so a little more racing and then I'll shoot the roof I'm just operators with the hive I've got one coat of primer on the whole hive but I'm gonna want to get a couple of coats of paint because once the bees are in here I really won't want to touch it for the roof I'll probably put a piece of aluminum on the roof and I also want to try to figure out how to put this on a hinge and I'll cover that on Tuesday when I do a recap there'll be a link on the screen there's a couple other things that I didn't mention and we'll just go through them real quick right now these are all of the bars they're upside down you can see that I've got the beeswax on the end of the bar so the bees can build their come off with it and this is the bee feeder and I got this from Philip Chandler he's got a really good video on YouTube and I'll put a link in the description I just thought this was a really good design the follower boards remember I mentioned these in the beginning of the video I'll talk a little bit more about these in the recap but let's put the feeder in the hive just because I thought that was a really good design and I want to show you the way it looks this is just a board with two holes cut out and the bees eat a mixture of sugar water and they just fit into those holes and the reason for this is you're basically trying not to disturb the bees so then you have your follower board and I still need to drill a hole in the follower board and this comes up tight against this door and then all of your bee bars are in place and the idea here is that you can lift the lid off and change the feed without disturbing the hive and I guess that's about it please leave a comment especially if you have any questions or if I'm doing something that I think is wrong I'd love to know because for me this is really a learning experience I'm hoping that I'll be able to get some beeswax maybe I can use that in my artwork and they'll be a lot of fun and we get some honey I know the kids are really excited about this project please subscribe and like me on Facebook and all that kind of stuff thanks for tuning in I'll see you on Tuesday