The Texas Beekeepers Association Summer Clinic was June 17, 2023, in Conroe and the timing worked out perfectly for a customer build. This customer wanted a pure cedar long lang with a gabled lid.
We started with a very long 2 inch cedar slab and you can see by the knots that it required a bit of epoxy fill! You will see two different cedar hives because we built two of them at the same time. The other customer did not need his hive until July but it is generally easier to build multiples. The color patterns came out wonderful on the bottom boards and inner lining. The cedar lining is rather difficult to build because I take one inch stock and have to rip it down on the bandsaw and then plane it down to less than 1/4″. That is not hard in itself, but if there are any knots in those pieces they almost always come apart. That means I have to be very picky. This is one reason the cover boards will have more knots than the lining. One of the hives had a lot of blonde wood which is fairly soft but it really complements the red wood nicely. We added some corner pieces to dress up the ends and hide the screws.
We loaded up this hive and another one that I will talk about in another post and left EARLY and drove two hours to Conroe. We also brought some 3d printed parts to sell and to help draw attention. Some time during the day the Apimaye guys brought over their top feeders to test fit them to my hive and they fit perfect. Did I mention that we always try to stick to standard sizes for a reason! I have been thinking of alternative top feeders for long hives rather than using frame feeders. Well, not sure why I didn’t think of this since I have some of these feeders on my apimaye hives! We even tested one of the newer feeders that can use soft sugar bricks. We can certainly supply them for new builds if needed.
It was wonderful seeing new and familiar faces at the clinic. I sometimes wonder why we bother putting time crunches on ourselves for these shows but then we go and remember how much fun they are. Thank you!
