I’ve now built three bait hives out of polystyrene broccoli boxes. One of the hives is made from a single broccoli box and the other two are made from two boxes stacked on top of each other. I’ve resized the boxes to suit full depth langstroth frames. The smaller box has 6 frames and the larger two each have twelve frames.
Resizing the boxes is easy although a little time consuming. I cut the boxes straight and square on a bench saw and reglue them sing polyurethane glue and wide packaging tape. The trick is to use a very small bead of glue in the centre of one piece to be joined and a mist of water on the other piece. Each cutting and gluing operation only takes a few minutes but then there is a four hour wait for the glue to set up.
Polystyrene foam is very weak so I build a light frame of rough sawn pine to support each hive.
The not so good news is that I’ve had plenty of bee visitors but I haven’t attracted a swarm yet.