This is a woodworking thread.......really

Paul Downes

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Westphalia, Michigan
So how was Memorial Day for the rest of the family? I had a very interesting day myself. Started off the day wrapping up a tiled back splash for the kitchen. Mostly some caulking and a few grout mistakes fixed, while my son worked at putting a laminate floor in. So the house was a mess but we had no real plans, just trying to make the home ready for my upcoming son's wedding in June.

So I had been thinking about my dad who served in WW2 Pacific theater as an army medic. Dad was an PhD entomologist by profession. He had started real young with a fascination with bugs and started keeping bee hives somewhere around 8-10 yrs old. I sure miss him. Anyway I look out the kitchen window and see a swarm of insects in the yard. I'm thinking, kind of early for manure flies.....what the heck? So my son goes out and comes back in, tells me "those are honey bees." The swarm lands on a maple tree in the yard. So I get to thinking, and rush off to the farm store and buy a brooder box. Of course I had to build a bottom and top for it. Another son Michael, helps me out.

So here's the woodworking part. Mike seems to love hanging out in the workshop. So I've been thinking on figuring out a woodworking or welding project to train the lad, and get him familiar with projects. So now we're going to build some hives and get ready should we find another swarm. Turns out a bee hive is a great project. We will use dovetail joints on the main box. Half laps on other parts and several other joints, dado's, etc.

I don't do Facebook. My kids however........they sent out a few pictures of the swarm and a few hours later a friend shows up with a bee hive hoping to collect the bees. I had already promised them to some other friends so he was out of luck. I did tell him if I found another swarm I would call him first. Next morning, when I was feeding the bees and working on the hive box, (I had to reduce the entrance and put the rest of the frames inside) the neighbor comes over and tells me there is a swarm in their front yard. So my friend got a swarm after all.

Overall a nice break from the norm.
 

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Very cool, Paul. Great chance to teach a bit of woodworking, and all for a good cause, too. :thumb:

We had a swarm of honey bees living here in a telephone utility riser box in our back yard a couple of summers ago. The riser box was just a couple of feet away from our back wall, among the seven or eight fruit trees we have back there. We left the bees alone because they seemed to be happy where they were and they weren't bothering us. Toward the end of the summer though, we noticed some kind of gummy substance around the opening they were using, and the bees were gone. We suspect the neighbors across the back wall sprayed something on the opening...either that or the phone company did it from the other side the wall. I know the phone company didn't go in our back yard, because our 90 pound Shepherd/Golden cross would have kept them out.
 
I saw a swarm a few weeks ago down by the river. Was really tempted to try and get them but had about a thousand other things I was doing so regretfully passed them by. My grandparents had bees when I was a kid, fond memories of going down there in my shirt sleeves barefoot to steal a little comb from the hive :) Never got stung doing that either.

I ended up doing a 13hr barley pop brew day (3 batches but one was overly complicated plus a bit of a problem/recovery that killed a lot of time). I did find the time to slap a little stain on some curly maple as a demo for some tap handles I'm designing for a friend (they're having wood selection decision paralysis).
 
My best friend in High School kept bees as a 4H project... Once when I was visiting him, he wanted to show me his bees... he went out to the hive, removed the hive cover and messed around with the frames... I stayed 20 yards away.... the bees never bother Joe at all, I got stung! Twice!
 
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