The many uses of a Snelgrove board

[Lesgold]

Hi Folks,

This year is going to be a quiet one in relation to honey production. The indications are that there will be no honey flow this season in my immediate area. Combined with a very dry winter and early the bees will only bring in  enough nectar to keep them going. At the moment there is a few native bush plants flowering and the stringy bark is also in bloom. Pollen is always abundant throughout the year but nectar is not always available due to the multiple years between flowering cycles on our Eucalypts. After three good years, the trees are all out of sequence and nothing is due to bud up until next year. The shed is full of honey so I?m not complaining. Swarm control will be the area that will produce the most work this season so there will be plenty of time to focus on other things.

When I first started in beekeeping, I built quite a few Snelgrove boards to use in the apiary. They got a bit of use early on but tended to fall out of favour over time. This year I will have the time to give them some use as I want to see I how well they perform in a few specialised tasks. I intend to experiment with them in a number of areas. These will include:

1) swarm control
2) splitting hives
3) making queen cells
4) increasing honey production (especially for comb production)
5) running a two queen hive.

I won?t be able to achieve all of the goals due to the dry conditions but I will learn a bit more about timing etc so that I can take advantage of the board during a good season. The spring build up will be slow this year so I will have a bit of time before the boards come into use. I?m hoping that you guys can teach me a few tricks to help with some of these techniques. As of two weeks ago, my home yard showed very little evidence of expansion or drone cell production in the hives. I will start checking in a few days time to  see if the situation has changed. Here is a photo of one of the 8 frame boards that I made. It?s basically a double screen board with a few more fancy attachments. Hope to hear from you soon.

Cheers

Les

[Michael Bush]

Once you start playing with these the uses keep multiplying.  Swarm control, mating nucs, nucs, queen rearing etc.

[NigelP]

Also can be used as emergency floor or crown board. Remove the mesh and add rhombus clearer board. A piece of kit I would never be without.

[The15thMember]

Also can be used as emergency floor

I just did this a couple of weeks ago.  I had a bottom board that had beetle slime all over it and needed to be cleaned, so I just set the hive on my Snelgrove board while I cleaned it up.  I also use mine to put a small colony overtop of a large one if the small one can't keep warm, is queenless and needs to be combined, or if I catch a swarm and then find I'm out of bottoms or tops.    I also used the Snelgrove board as an escape board a little while ago, when I wanted to remove the bees out of the bottom box of one of my hives.  I figured most of the bees in the box were foragers, and I knew the queen wasn't in there, so I just set the box on top of the Snelgrove board on top of the hive, and opened the entrance facing backwards.  The next day the foragers left to collect and returned to the hive by the normal entrance, clearing the top box.   

[Lesgold]

What a good idea Reagan. So obvious and so simple when you explained it. I remember Michael Bush talking about having a hive queenless to help with comb honey production. That thought has stayed with me and the idea of using a Snelgrove board to achieve this has potential. I won?t have a honey flow this season to test the idea but I will still run through a process to figure out some timing so that it could be utilised next season.