Laurence Edwards shows how to modify a crown board with drilled holes to hold upturned 8-ounce jars for growing honeycomb inside them. Precise measurements and depth matter. The finished jars sell well each year.
Welcome to another exclusive video for premium channel members. Today we're going to talk about how to set up multi-purpose crown boards to do cut comb in jars. Now you may have seen this before, it's such a cool technique. This is the one that's going to sell out every single year, and what it is is taking a multi-purpose crown board, cutting some holes in strategic positions into it, upturning a glass jar into those holes, and then letting the bees build wild comb directly in your glass jars. What you then go on to do is you take these jars out, you get rid of all of the bees, and then you top them up with honey. You put the lid on and you end up with the most amazing product, which is pure natural honeycomb in the jar topped up with honey that you can sell, and they sell like hotcakes. So in this video, I'm going to show you every single step all the way along. The first part of the video today, I'm going to show you how I modify my multi-purpose crown boards In order to accept the jar. You can completely tweak this, just make it work with the jars that you're using. I like to do it with 8-ounce jars because it means you can get a lot more jars into that multi-purpose crown board, but any jar will work. And then later on in the video, we'll talk about how to set up the colonies to get the best out of them, how to put the jars on, how long you should leave them, how to harvest the jars, how to top them up with honey, and how to present them at the end. So this is the multi-purpose crown board that I'm using here. I made this one myself, but you can buy these really cheap from a number of different beekeeping manufacturers. Just make sure when you're getting them you get the measurements right and you're getting enough depth to take the jar that you wanna put in. The ones that I use here, they're a couple of millimetres short, so it means that I need to put an upturned crown board on top just to give it the space. But you can do the same with an empty super as well, so pretty much any multi-purpose crown board will work, and you just need to drill the holes as I'm gonna show you on this video. So this is what the multi-purpose crown board looks like. You can see, just a really basic construction. Decent amount of depth on this edge here. Like I said, it's not important though, 'cause you can add an additional super on. And all I've done is I've gone and marked it up with all of these lines that you can see on it. Everywhere that there's a cross, I'm going to drill a hole and I'm going to put a jar over that hole. So you can see they fit in quite nicely. Got a little bit of a lip on this side here, so all I'm going to do is I'm just going to put an upturned crown board on the top to give me that additional depth. And then all we need to do now is drill some holes on all of those marked spots there to give the bees access to come up into those jars. So I've cut all of the holes within the multipurpose crown board now, and what you just need to make sure before you cut the holes is that each of the jars is not gonna clash with the jar next to it. You need to measure the jars, you need to put them into position, mark the centers to make sure that they're not gonna overlap. So when I take this first jar here and place that over this hole there, and then I take the next jar and I place it over the adjacent hole, A, they're not gonna overlap each other, but B, there's enough space for them both to sit. You take the next jar as well, you can put that on there. You get the idea, they need to be able to sit in their position like that over their respective hole. So there we go, we're all set to put our multi-purpose crown board onto our colony. Next part of this video, I'm gonna show you how to select a good colony to put this onto, how to prepare that colony to make sure that they're actually going to go up and start drawing out honeycombs in those jars. And you'll be amazed at just how quickly the bees go up into these jars, start to draw their honeycomb into them. So stay tuned for the next episode. This one is going to be so much fun.
