Height wise we tried John with up to 3 layers of supers but he found it more comfortable dealing with two, as don’t forget he also had to shift 4 super boxes before he got to the brood box.
Other problems we also encountered was that he needed some form of carrier as when he removed a full super he had to carry it back to his house so we made a couple of boxes up so he could roll down the road with a half super hanging on each side of his chair.
PPE.
This poor sod got stung so many times until we sorted it out, it went way past a joke on several occasions, secondly we had to on more then once remove trousers to get at stings which were even funnier than you can imagine.
I only wear normal trousers and a bee top. John’s problems were that they were ok, BUT, if a bee went down between the wheel chair back support and him, it would sting into him when he sat up. Second problems were that he kept getting stung on his bum via the underneath of the chair seat as his was made from a mesh. Also when he did get stung his legs would swell up as anyone else would but with no pain he had to be careful not to get stung to many times as it started to affect him, i.e. shock etc, hypo sensitive.
We sorted it out with a padded cushion under his bum and back and two sets of trousers one normal one made from Velcro so he could that then off when he wanted to. Think sleeping bag idea but shorter.
Gloves were not used, because he wanted it that way, i personally always have to wear them.
Shoes rather than changing into willies all the time what we came up with was a couple of demin bags that went over his feet to seal the shoes to the trousers, that worked pretty well and saved mucking about with shoes and boots. We eventually went into a small sleeping bag idea that he just pulled up to his hips and tucked into his jacket.
We also had to re wire his veil, as when you use a bee suit sat down it has a habit of rising up or being in the wrong place, so we used some brass wire to stiffen the hood section up. He also found that a baseball cap under the veil helped keep every thing tightly in shape to. They have to sit lower down the face when your sat down as the back normally holds the front in place with him leaning forward we lost that control.
Ho,Be aware of what ever sort of medical stuff they carry around with them too, we had a bee sting, puncture into Johns bag the once, we ended up using duct tape on it so he could get to hospital to get it changed, when he did fall over with the full super we burst that bag as well.
Now this is where things started to get complicated.
John being unemployed and on benefits wanted to make some money from honey.
He has all day to get to the hives and back and the busses run all the time in Brum, but he had only a limited time slots some days to do manipulations, so we use to use a massive fisherman’s umbrella to cover him up from the rain whilst he worked on the bees. Which is ok but when its windy he could not put his foot on it, to hold it still where as i could. So we made a steel tube with a bolt on the side so once in place he could tighten the bolt up to help steady it.
So the bee sheds were then designed and invented and built by me and a friend and John. John managed to play the helpless cripple act on several idiots and managed to blag off the council 6 allotment plots all roughly the same size, about 15 foot square or 5metres in modern money. This meant we could build a shed approximately 12 foot by 8 foot and have a decent pathway to it.
In a shed 12 foot by 8 foot we can have three hives on the 8 foot wall and more down the sides, or four on each side. We reckoned 10 were its limits, if we doubled stack we could do 20 but per area we were dealing with 8 is fine. John could not have reached that high anyway.
Each shed was set up using a scaffold boards and ply wood as a base with a standard 3by2 frame and ply on the outside, no linings on the insides apart from the hive support frames. This allowed his feet to go underneath the hive he was working on.
Honey extraction due to the can being so high needed him to find his latest girlfriend a job to do, but i suppose he could have used anyone. A small pump or scoop to get the honey from the bottom of the extractor to the container on his kitchen base would have worked as well. But that’s a separate issue really.
Hive types.
We played with several hive ideas outside, to find which one worked the best for him. I thought personally that a DARLINGTON ticked almost every box as design and style went as we cannot go up in size brood wise, why not go side ways?? John just said crap so we moved on! He started then looking at inside bee shed hives and we stopped using outside hives. But there’s no reason why they won’t work its just personal tastes.
Danants were to heavy frame wise for him to lift when full of brood, so we went smaller, commercials and langstroffs looked good but we were having problems with small ended frames and John, so we decided to get a National frame involved. A standard Carnie queen easily out grows a small nation brood box and we don’t have enough range to go up a brood box or to use 12 by 14 frames, so i tried building a side ways hive for us to use, it was basically 16 frames long with three, four frame supers on the top. These were great for everyone and we used then in most of the bee sheds, also it meant for him selling bee nucs in the spring were on standard national frames which are easy to sell onwards.
So nationals with 16 frames it was. It did mean every thing in the shed got squished up against each other but he was fine with that. And the super boxes stayed at 4 frames width so we had three supers going across and two high six per hive with three spare.
Shed wise because we were building then off the floor level we had to make a ramp up for him to use, this was roughly 4 foot wide with a platform on the top and wide enough door to open to get his chair through and the one window we had had to be able to be opened and closed via a pull chord as its out of his reach.
The one thing that made a massive difference to me when helping him is to sit in a chair and look at it from his point of view, there really is a difference in perspective on the subject. Try it the next time you try to do an inspection.
