With some money to spare due to good honey and soap sales last year, I thought it would be good to add accessories to the hives (aka pimp them up). Among the items I purchased were castellated spacers. Now, having studied some history and also paid attention during several guided tours of castles, I knew the privilege to castellate a house was highly desirable in the middle-ages, because it basically meant you could add battlements to your house, making your home a castle. I wanted to do the same with the hives, though the battlements aren't really visible. In a hive you mainly add castellations to the inside of the supers to keep the frames evenly spaced (which is why they are actually called spacers). As I have had issues with sliding super frames in the past, I thought this was the perfect solution.
Regular readers will already know where this is leading - not all turns out as simple as it seems.
Although three supers are on the hives, there are still three empty ones I thought I could castellate. The problem was the spacers were longer than the inside of the super. So, using the kind of gentle persuasion only a hammer can give, I wedged the spacers into the side panels. This meant the spacers warped a bit, but I hope the nails will hold them in place until the bees propolize the spacers down for good.
 |
| Wedging battlements into the inside of a super |
 |
| A super castle |
 |
| Frames spaced in the castellations |
No comments:
Post a Comment