What are people's opinions/experience with the cost of buying tools to fabricate your own hive against buying hives ready made?
So much depends on
what you intend to make; the source of wood you have; whether you cost your time or not; the required level of finished appearance; and - whether you actually like working with wood.
If you intend making standard Langstroth or National boxes, then it's really pointless trying to out-compete those companies who buy wood in bulk and use production-line techniques. So, it's far better to buy seconds or similar flat-packs from their suppliers.
If you're making (say) Warre hives - then it's a different story. Even those commercially-made are usually one-offs or small runs. The Warre hive was actually intended to be a home-built design, so lends itself well to the home builder with few tools.
If you want to make Long Hives (my favourite) or any form of horizontal Top Bar Hive, then home construction is
de rigeur - just don't expect to sell them for top money. But then, 'top-money' hives, built to the standards of high-quality furniture make absolutely no sense at all - unless you plan to be in the business of selling them to the idealistic inexperienced, of course - as they are simply boxes to hold insects, and that is all. A few years in the weather, and with a coating of propolis inside, reveals the reality of beehives - the construction of which needs to be closer to that of a garden shed than a piece of Chippendale.
Wood. Wood in Britain is expensive. Wood purchased from the High Street sheds is insanely expensive. So if you have a sawmill nearby, go talk to them. I have a pallet distribution yard near me, so that's my source of free wood (free plywood, free rigid plastic sheeting etc). If you're working to a budget, then you need to work with what you can easily source. Any fool can pay top-dollar and have the stuff delivered ...
Labour/Time. Why spend all day building a couple of 30 quid boxes, when you could be working at something else far more lucrative and buying 'em in ready made ?
Tools. One of my great passions in life is what I call 'field engineering' - and by that I mean the making of perfectly serviceable items by the use of minimal technology: just hand tools and the most basic of power tools. In my view, making boxes to house insects lends itself perfectly to this ideology.
If you need a router table - than make one using a hand-held router, If you need a table saw, then make one using a hand-held circular saw. With a little ingenuity, jigs can then be made for cutting hand-holds, turning a router into a thicknesser, and so on. Of course such methodology has it's limitations, and is pretty obviously not suitable for mass production - but then we're not talking mass production ...
Finally - do you
really want to build your own bee boxes (and various boards, shims, NUCs etc) - or are you simply wanting to save money ? Doing something you really enjoy doing is an important consideration, in my view.
LJ