I've been busy lately making honey supers, like any other super except I'll be using them for honey only. We're using shallow supers because when filled with honey they can still be about 40 lbs, a little easier to handle. The foundations have drone sized wax foundation in them to yield more honey and I've been told it will come out easier. Once everything is done I'll paint part of the top bar green to identify them as drone frames so if they ever get put in as brood chambers by mistake I wont have only drones, because the cells for drones are bigger then worker bee cells. The construction of the frames and supers was a mass production line for me. I built and painted the supers first so I'd have a place to for the frames when they were finished to protect them. This job wasn't too bad not that long standing over the table saw making repeated cuts, but the frames, well that's another story. Once I cut the top and bottom bars to length and width, there were addition cuts requires to size them to fit. The bottom only took two extra cuts to make a groove in it to fit the foundation, not that bad even when I'm making 40 frames. But the top took several more cuts, and set up with a dado blade. To put it into perspective I stood over the table saw one day and made a 1000 passes over the blade, one job you want to make sure you pay attention to every cut even when doing it over and over again. The end pieces on the other hand took a while to cut into shape. I used 2 x 4's to make the shape needed for end boards, with about a dozen cuts on each blank, I started with 8 blanks to make 88 end boards. Once milled to size I just ran them through the blade and cut out 3/8 inch wide pieces, it went rather well actually. Once all the pieces were done I used my assembly jig to glue and nail them together and once I got the wax foundation I set them in and push nailed a nailing bar in place and now we wait for spring.
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| 40 frames and nailing bars ready for foundation. |
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| 5 more shallow supers done. |
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| Wax foundations installed, ready for the supers. |
