Bee(keeper) space

Beekeeping & Apiculture Forum

Help Support Beekeeping & Apiculture Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.
Whatever you decide, it will never be enough.
Our main building is 100 ft x 47, fully racked & contains honey room, One quarter of this is for vehicle maintance, the rest is pretty full. Second is 25 x 20, this is our box storage, and currently full to rafters with supers, Ashforth feeders & spare broods.
It's very scary how quickly space is being consumed.
The cardboard works cheers (y)
 
Our garage is liberally lined with 2 meter high shelving, ( courtesy of Aldi/Dexion/wood from old church pews)
It has a floored loft above for storage where I store unused equipment : propagators,/wood/spare wood , more wood, extractors/buckets.
In the garage I store unused frames/foundation/fondant/insulation/CBs etc. cars, lawnmower and more gardening equipment, woodworking and garage tools and machines etc.
In a spare bedroom about 3 boxes of empty jars.

All supers and unused boxes are stored outside on stands (I built extra stands / roofs to cope). All strapped down for winter gales.

We could do with more space.. but as I am determined not to expand:
the garage itself will have to do.. treble, stone built with pit so expansion would not be cheap
 
I have a large garage / workshop extension built onto the bungalow. It was becoming over full of stuff.
I have all gardening equipment stored there and for a time all beekeeping stuff.
I fixed a wide shelf above a section where logs are stored and onto it I store all my wet supers individually wrapped and sectioned off with ply.
On my bench I have two ”nucleus towers” ready to go. I have a metal filing cabinet storing frames in the deep drawers and foundation (flat) and smaller bits in the shallow drawer. Another small cupboard houses vaping stuff, wasp traps and fondant boxes.
In an outside log store, roofed but open fronted, leaning against the garage end wall, I have two heaps of brood boxes, some with just frames some with foundation / drawn comb. Also, spare floors and roofs having changed from wood to poly roofing.
So far I have proved it is possible to live without a shed, but I keep looking at places where I can put one all the same.
 
One of my landlords has just agreed to allow me to store a pallet of jars, that I'm just about to order, at his place. I've still got about a 1/3 pallet left from my last order a year ago so can't squeeze another pallet load into my storage.
His generosity should save me about £200. 😊
 
I have half a small shed (shared with the garden tools, including the chipper and lawn mower), a small cupboard in the office (where I store beeswax, medications, gloves and ingredients for cosmetics), boxes of honey jars in the cupboard under the stairs (next to the front door for easy sales) and a pull out drawer under a sofa in the spare room (great for trays of full or empty jars, and big blocks of fondant).
There is NEVER enough space.
In fact I've decided that the extractor (luckily just a two-frame plastic one) is going to be moving into the loft this year, just to free up a bit more floor space in the shed. It's infuriating that an extractor it takes up so much room and there's not really anything you can store inside it to make better use of the space it takes up.

I think you just have to be creative with the space that you do have. I try to plan shelving in the shed to fit frames/boxes/nucs etc. most efficiently, and use hooks to hang bundles of frames, kit bags, from the ceiling and stack whatever I can on stands outside.
 
We have a shed with our suits, hive tools and inspection equipment, garage for the spare brood boxes and supers,cupboard under the stairs for boxes of jars and labels, small bedroom for extractor and sieves.A bit of everything everywhere. Seems to work for us at the moment!!!
 
There have been many times where I've looked back and felt the loss of my childhood home, the coach house and adjoining stables (which had a concrete floor) both had a full height cellar which had two windows (built on a slope) it also had a full height first floor with a proper stairs as well a a front opening door to hoist goods up. The only thing it didn't have was mains water (easily fixed) although at the tender age of fourteen I had managed to connect the building to a spare breaker in the house so it had mains power.
 
Absolutely agree. It's also worth mentioning the sense of trying to get at least one wall plate as high as possible (which means a pent roof in most garden environments) to allow for a semi open lean to to be added for box storage at a later date if its ever required. A useful recommendation from the writings of Frank Henderson; not a beekeeper but he knew a bit about agricultural buildings.

I accidentally found a use for that sort of building after being asked to create a something behind the hen-shed. It will also be useful if I ever decide to use skeps.

20220124_131026.jpg
 
I appear to have posted twice ,is it possible to delete a message ? The grandchildren aren't around to show me the error of my Luddite ways.
 
Last edited:
About that doghouse
As I no longer work spaniels our recent dogs live in the house so the doghouse now holds all the feeders, clearer boards, Demarree boards etc - the covered run is now a stores for all the supers an brood boxes holding wet drawn frames
 
Back
Top