Working on Beehives and frugality

The next adventure on my sustainability path is beekeeping. For any and all who know me, that might seem a bit of an interesting change. I don't like getting stung. But I can only recall one sting from a honey bee, and I was about 4 years old then. The numerous other stings I've received have been from yellow jackets, wasps, ground hornets, and bumble-bees. Those stings have all happened when I stumbled into, mowed over, or otherwise disturbed their nests.

I have been reading everything I can about beekeeping. At first it seemed prohibitively expensive, but as I read more, I found something called a Kenyan Top Bar Hive. It seems that this type of hive can be built for very little, and is easy to assemble. So, I found some plans, and modified them to what I want to build, and used Google's Sketchup program to model it. Here is the link to the model. You can look at a sketch of the model, but if you want to view the entire thing, you will need Google's Sketchup program installed. It is free, and really cool.

Anyway, I've started construction of 2 hives. I had some old 2x4s in the shed, and milled them into 98 top bars. I will be using some of these to make into following boards and the rest will be used on the hives themselves. The top bars are what the bees attach the comb to.

I went to Home Depot today to get some of the other hardware and lumber and supplies that I need for the hives. I picked up wood screws, some bolts and nuts (for the legs) and linseed oil, and 2-12" extension clamps (to help glue up the boards). After I got all that, I went looking for lumber. That is when I got disgusted. Home Depot really does charge a lot of $$$ for warped boards, bent, skewed and twisted. I started going through all of them and the more I looked the more disgusted I became. These hives were supposed to be able to be built inexpensively! So, I started to walk around to the other side of the racks. Down by the large saws that Home Depot has, there was a cart with lots of 1x6's that were 10 feet long. There was a sign on the cart that said to buy the wood; it had 2 feet of the end of each board water damaged. Kinda like the truck that had been hauling it didn't put a tarp on the last 2 feet, and it got really wet and just sat. Anyway, I found an associate and found out that they were selling these things for $0.51 a board! I immediately found 14 of the best looking ones and loaded up my cart. Total cost for more wood than I will need to build 4 hives - $7.14. A huge coup for me. Besides, the bees won't care if the wood is a little damaged. And I'm planning on using linseed oil mixed with beeswax on the outside of them anyway. They will get weathered and water damaged eventually anyway. So Wow! Neat and cool! It really can be advantageous to look around, and not just settle on the first thing you see. And if I have boards left over, I can still use most of them anyway on nicer projects.
I love those frugal deals.
When I got home I told Mary of what I had found, she asked if I wanted to go back and get the rest of it. I didn't go back, because I don't have a place to store that much lumber here at the house. I can't keep it dry either. So I didn't go back for more. I reckon that some other people need a chance to share the bounty of that great deal.

I will get to work building the beehive bodies later this week. And the total cost of the wood so far - about $13 - counting the 2x4s I had already milled into top bars. Not bad.