A couple of pictures

Here are a couple of mildly entertaining pictures for you, and a bit of explanation.

Modern beehives don't look anything like the cute little straw skeps that people associate with beekeeping. They are stacked towers of rectangular wooden boxes, filled with removable frames in which the bees build their comb, ideally/hopefully in neat rows with no junk in between. This allows for convenient manipulation, expansion, and so on, but it's also legally required, because it permits the inspector to get a good look at the hive and assure himself that it is disease-free. Most people order their hives unassembled, because it's cheaper and shipping costs less that way. We did. We also decided to get medium-sized boxes (the choices being shallow, medium, and deep, and Jacob can give numbers if he wants--he's the more technically minded between us), because shallows aren't really appropriate for brood chambers (where the bees actually live and the queen lays eggs), and deeps, once full, would be very difficult for me to lift. All mediums, though, means that there are more frames to make up than if some of the hive was made from deeps. And the pieces for frames are little and weedy and the nails that are used to put them together are similarly little and weedy. We ordered 100 frames, and of those 100, I assembled four. Go me!

Here's Jacob, working away.

And here are most of the frames, assembled and stashed in the closet. That's 1000 little weeny nails, ladies and gentlemen, and dozens more bent and twisted in the trash. And for only two hives. And I wondered, even for a second, why we would choose to buy established hives when the opportunity arose?