Stands - what are people using?

Would people be willing to share their various stand ideas? I want to put the hive well above ground and keep the ants out.

Have a look at the following posts:
http://forum.honeyflow.com/t/beehive-stands-are-they-necessary/1484

http://forum.honeyflow.com/t/show-a-pic-of-your-setup/6581

http://forum.honeyflow.com/t/hive-stand-considerations/6410

http://forum.honeyflow.com/t/finished-the-simple-hive-stand/3799

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Thank you Roderick. That’ll teach me not to use the search feature! Lots of good ideas.

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Hi Kevin, my standard hive stand is 4 besser blocks & 2 pieces of hardwood.

And no drama with ants, Jeff?

I’m at Buderim & my main bee site is at Maroochydore/North Buderim. There’s all sorts of ants there but I don’t have any trouble with them. There’s also some at Palmwoods & I don’t have trouble with ants there either. My main reason for lifting my hives up high is on account of cane toads.

I am using cinderblocks. One modification I did to this setup later after discovering ants inside the hive was to insert boards between the blocks and the hive so I could see if ants were entering the hive. With just the cinderblocks, they could enter from between the blocks in the middle without me knowing it. I also now have a couple of jugs of syrup/borax with 1/8" holes slid inside the blocks below the hive which seems to have solved my ant problem.

https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex016/uploads/honeyflow/optimized/2X/9/940bfcb2c71c71205cf43d59aef6674f6b963d49_1_690x388.jpg

They look great. Are you in Australia? I can’t see/find them anywhere here…

You can’t get them in Australia. I contacted the supplier in America and the shipping costs were twice the price of the stand. (Trying to ship anything from the U.S. has become incredibly expensive)

Amazon has them but wont ship to Australia.

Here is what I ended up making with some pine battens. Does the job.

Thanks Matt. I can’t nail two bits of wood together myself, so I may go with the besser block and timber slats option initially until something better comes along.

Cinder blocks and landscape timbers here. I think I spent around $15US

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This is what I’m planning to use. Slightly modified.

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Hi people this my first time on this forum. I live in Northern New South Wales on the table lands where it gets rather cold.

At the moment I have not used my two Flow Hives as I decided to wait until spring to disturb my bees as the hives only arrived in march and the weather was starting to turn cold. So as you can imagine I am rather keen to use my new hives, Patience is a virtue they say.

So having time on my hands I assembled the Hoop-pine classic, and converted a Langford Box for the extra extra flow frames and in general fussed about painting them and letting them air out to lose the smell of the paint. Now all I have to do is wait for spring.

Hive Stands
I was having trouble with meat ants attacking the hive so I sprinkled some ant dust on the ground and then lifted my hives.
With Cafe table stands. that is a single sharft table with five foot extensions on the bottom of the raising tube.
Picked it up at my local recycling depot at the local tip also used an Office chair took the seat off it and mounted the hive on it.
It also allows me to swivel the hive into the sun during winter, without actually having to disturb the hive by moving it.
The table stand is quite stable but the chair has to be placed on an even surface because it does not have the very stable spread of the feet.

My bees seem to be very happy in in their hi-rise appartment which is situated in my 20 tree orchard. The fruit trees loosing their leaves in winter gives them some air conditioning, Cool in summer and full sun in winter now what more could they ask for ?
Both hives are carrying a full supa of honey as I do not want to stress the bees, food wise, also there is a second supa which is partially full.

I started bee keeping just to improve pollination in my orchard and garden, the honey is a by product as far as I am concerned. although it be a nice by-product in fact I am not a honey eater at all. My family tell me its great honey mainly being from White and Yellow Box trees.

Kind regards to all on the Forum

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Welcome Harry, any photos of your cafe style bee hive stand? Sounds very interesting. Thanks for mentioning the trees in your area, you may not be aware but White Box can causes colony stress due to a lack of suitable protein in the pollen. So if there are no other floral sources at flowering time, I would suggest you feed pollen supplements. There is a bit more detail here:
http://www.honeybee.com.au/Library/pollen/nutrition.html

I have the same problem with Hawaii. Shipping anything if they even do.

Here are a couple of stands I made from a 6ft x 4ft pallet, the sort used for transporting sheets of board

The original pallet…

using a minimum number of cuts…

and so a minimum number of nails…

it turned out to be just a little too long to fit in the space it ended up in, so I turned it into two stands…

the small one turned out to be more useful than I thought, I move it around for a convenient platform to stack the boxes on when I inspect the different hives.

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Here is the stand I made using some old cross-arms from electricity poles. I have upside down pots on each corner filled with grease to prevent ants. There is room for a few more hives too.

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I started with concrete blocks like this.
But started having problems with ants. And I found a cane toad right up underneath the SBB. So now I have gone to this. With the extra bit out the back to put a board on at harvest time.

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I used 4 steel posts to hold up a 2x8 frame 16 ft long; very sturdy, and convenient working height.

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Mine is almost exactly the same as yours for the Flows, except I am using 4 cedar planks. Lots of space to put things, great height, looks good, easy to mow around and maintain.