How To Build a Beehive Floor with an Underfloor Entrance

Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. Today, a long-awaited video, but I'm going to show you how to build my underfloor entrances. First thing to say, this isn't my design, although a couple of the versions of this floor I've tweaked and just made them a little bit kind of bespoke to my requirements and bespoke to the materials that I've got. The guy that I got the design from is a guy called Emir Jenkins, great beekeeper from down south, and when I say down south, I mean down south in Wales. But yeah, he took the Dartington floor and put his own slant on it, and that is the floor that I use, and that is the floor that you see in all of my videos. So in this video, I'm going to show you how to make that floor, and then I'm also going to show you 2 or 3 Other versions of that floor that I use and I make with the materials that I've got. So first thing to say about this floor is it's really, really simple to make. This is the number one reason that I love this floor. So basically I use 4x1 timber, rough sawn, really doesn't matter if it's rough. This wood here is actually wringing wet straight from the yard, but it's a 4x1 timber. And then all I do is I take a standard 4x1 timber. And I have some lengths cut to 460mm, which is the exterior dimension of a national hive. And then I have some other lengths cut to— and this is where it might be slightly different with the wood that you're using— but it is effectively 460mm like that. And then you have a distance in between the two, and this will become apparent when we do the video. So it's effectively 460mm minus 2 widths. of whatever wood you're using. So in this, in this instance here, I'm using 460mm pieces and 415mm pieces. And it is as simple as that. Like, this is no-nonsense beekeeping here. It doesn't get much more simple than going and buying a length of 4x1 from your local timber merchant and chopping it up. Some lengths are 460mm, some lengths are 415mm. That is it. It is as simple as that. And then all we're doing is we're gluing and screwing it together. Again, this wood soaking wet, like that bit there, it's so heavy you can feel it's dripping wet. So I use a polyurethane glue and I use screws to stick it all together. And you, you would have seen these videos, you would have seen the floors, they're rough and ready, um, but they're— they last really, really well because you're using a good waterproof glue that doesn't mind the wood actually being wet. So if you've got wet wood, you can't use a PVA, a PVA glue like that. You really do need to use the polyurethane. But to be honest, this floor is so simple, it will stay together with screws. If you just screw it, absolutely fine. So we've spoken a little bit about the benefits of the floor in previous videos. Big benefits of the floor: it's cheap, it's simple to make, really, really good at stopping vermin attacks in the winter. And good at stopping wasp attacks late in the season. They're the reasons that I love it. It's a bottom bee space floor, but it's very easy to modify that floor to turn it into a top bee space floor, and I'll show you how to do that on one of the versions today. So this video, I'm going to give you all the information you need in order to make the version of the floor that I make, and I'm going to show you 2 or 3 different versions of that as well. I'll show you a top bee space version. I'll show you a solid floor version, and I'll show you a couple of iterations of where I put the mesh. So to start off with though, I'm going to show you my standard version that I have on all of my hives, and this is the version that I've seen from Emir Jenkins, Bryn Mawr Honey. So that's the guy who's given me the idea for this. All I'm doing is putting together the video just to show you how I make it. So let's start, and like I say, it's really, really simple. I'll stop and I'll freeze and I'll put kind of cut lists and different pictures up to show you where I am. But we'll run through the different sections and hopefully it's really, really easy and you can make plenty of these at home. So to start off, floor 1. This is the standard version of the floor that I make. You want to take with your 4x1, and I say 4x1, this can be 3x1, 5x1, 6x1, whatever you've got. Yeah, this floor, the beauty of it is it doesn't matter how deep your wood is, it doesn't matter how thick your wood is, All you need to do is take 2 pieces of wood, cut them to 460mm long, and that gives you 2 sides. And then what you want to do is cut some other bits of wood, and what you need to do is you need to make sure however you cut them that that dimension there is also 460mm. So you're just doing basically, um, One width of whatever wood you've got plus one width of whatever wood you've got plus a distance to make 460mm. In this case, if you're using 4x1, it works out roughly— I mean, the wood's different every time— it works out at 460 for these 2 pieces, and that bit there is 415mm. So when you put the tape measure on it, you come out with 460mm. So then the little bit of prep that you need to do before this is you need to cut some strips of 8mm wood, and these are just spacers. You can use a drill bit or anything that's exactly 8mm, and that is the most critical dimension on this floor. The slot where they come up to get into the hive, it needs to be 8mm. There's no— you can't use 6mm, you can't use 10mm, it needs to be 8mm, which is a single bee space. So just chop some strips, bit of plywood, bit of ply, whatever you've got, bit of pine we've got here, just to space Because you need some sort of spacer. So I just break them in half, and then it's that dimension there. There's 8mm here, and then what you're looking to do is you're looking to put this piece of wood on the front here like that, and then you want to space this pit here 8mm away. So I've only got 2 hands, so I'm going to have to stop I'll glue it, I'll screw it, and I'll show you exactly what it looks like once you put this together. So then once you come to that point, you can take out your spacers. They've served their purpose. And then That is the floor pretty much complete in terms of the wood. Now on that side, you can, if you want, and I like to do this, I like to put a landing board in there. I find the bees, they kind of have like an internal, almost like a tunnel landing. There's no reason really not to do that. What it does is it gives you a little bit of an overhang at the bottom. So if you want to do that, you can cut that bit off. You'll see what I mean in a minute when I do the pictures. But for the kind of the sake of absolute simplicity, I mean, you basically get a very slight rebate at the bottom. So I know for some people this little lip here would annoy them and they want to kind of cut like a fresh piece of wood to kind of make that fill up to there. Obviously I am not fussed about that. This is no-nonsense beekeeping. We're not fussed about an 8mm kind of like rebate into it there. So yeah, that's it. You stick that in and then obviously you screw that piece in as well, making sure it's sitting flush to the bottom this side. And that's it. I mean, that, that is in real time, me kind of pretty much showing you exactly how to do it. Obviously I pre-cut the wood, took me seconds because it's such a simple design. You've got 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. 10. Got 4 pieces of wood that are 450mm long. Doesn't matter what depth they are, doesn't matter what width they are. And then you've got 2 pieces of wood that are 460mm long. That's the size of an exterior National hive. You could tweak this as well for any other hive you do. You could do a commercial, Dadant, Langstroth. Obviously, if you're going down that route, you need to make sure you put rims on the top that I'll show you in another one to make sure that it's a top bee space depending on what hive So then the only thing left to do is you take some mesh, some varroa mesh. I bought this from Simon the Beekeeper. A bit flimsy, to be honest. I'm not overly sold on the, the quality of the mesh that he sold me here. But all you do is you just take a mark, put it on like that, get some snips, give yourself a rough guide, and then you just want to snip across. Right, so you want to cut your piece of mesh. Do it with some proper tin snips, not these little piddly things that I've got here that took ages. And then you just want to place that on there, and it doesn't need to be perfect. What I've found from previous experience is you want to offset it in a little bit, so you want it coming in from the edge just so it doesn't catch on anything. Sometimes catches on my leg, which is really annoying. So yeah, just kind of put it on like that. And then you're just sticking your screws in. And I find the screwing it down is probably the best method for this. You can hammer it down with little pins, but just kind of work your way around, going around from both ends just so you don't cause any creases. Find maybe like 3 or 4 screws per side is about right. And that is it, we're done. It's really, really simple. I mean, the whole surface there is completely flat, so you can use it as a bottom V-space. Now, if you wanted to turn that into a top V-space, You need to take an 8mm rim, obviously a bit thicker than that, and just go all the way around the edge. 8mm rim, it's actually quite nice because it seals over all of where the mesh is like that. And do the mesh a bit tidier than me, use some good snips. Um, the mesh, I've got a little bit of an overhang there just because I haven't cut it properly and the snips aren't very good, but you really want to inset that by maybe like 5 or 10mm just so it doesn't snag on the outside like that. Um, but yeah, for a bottom bee space hive, that is my standard underfloor entrance. So all of this space here, you've got mesh, obviously nothing can get in underneath because it's got mesh. On the top, you've got a single piece of wood which is the same width as all the other pieces of wood. You've got an 8mm entrance along there. On this side, you've got your entrance slot and an integrated landing floor. And what happens is the bees Come in there, and then they go up the slot and into the hive. So that is version 1, the standard underfloor entrance that I use on all of my hives. Right, so option 2, and this is the second variation of my underfloor entrance. Again, I didn't come up with the original design, but this is something that I've put together— this solid floor version of the underfloor entrance. So if you don't want a mesh floor and you want to go with a solid floor, here is the underfloor entrance floor with a solid floor. And again, it starts with exactly the same pieces— 2 460mm long pieces of wood. Doesn't matter what depth, doesn't matter what width, you can make it work with any wood you've got. Put them there. You then take another piece of wood and All of these designs are based on the exact same dimensions as each other. You're just striving for 460mm by 460mm exterior dimension. That's what the national hive is. So same as the standard underfloor entrance, first thing to do is get that piece of wood in there. So you've got your upside down— oh, you've got your N or your upside down U. Doesn't matter. I mean, that's not square, but it will become square as you move on. Right, so in the other one, so in the first iteration, the next piece of wood went there. Now in this one, it doesn't work putting it there, so the next piece of wood actually has to go in here, and you work this, this one from back to front as opposed to from front to back. So you just basically go along, put in your pieces of wood in. So then once you've got 3 pieces in, and you kind of just need to do this by eye, you take the 4th piece along there, and what you're looking to do is go back to the original design, but we are not leaving a gap this time. It's a bit strange. Um, so basically what you're looking for is that. And then it's pretty much follow the previous design as it goes. Get your 8mm strips in, drop them down into the pallet, which is always good fun. Take that. So then you get that, you can take your spacers out, and you can see where we're going with this. It's exactly the same design, but all you've done is just filled that piece with solid wood. There's really no kind of difference from that. What I would say is don't use ply or don't think it's going to be easier just to use any sheet material on there. You probably could use OSR, but it will degrade over time. If you use solid wood like that, these will last forever, but they obviously are considerably heavier than other floors. But it just, it depends what you're looking for. If you want to go for a nice solid light floor, you can use the mesh. And then the final thing that we're going to add is just the internal landing board again. So again, exactly the same thing. You're just going to put that in at the bottom. Again, you've got your little lip there, little rebate, doesn't matter, it's only kind of the aesthetics. And just get some screws in to hold that in place. And that's it, that's the solid floor version of it. So same as normal, um, everything on the top is flush, there's no lips, there's nothing like that. That's because we're using it for bottom bee space boxes. If you're doing it with top space, you need to put your 8mm rim around the top. You've got your slot, which obviously most important dimension, 8mm. These come in there, land on the board, and then they go up through that slot and enter in. Now that slot, it doesn't matter where you put that slot. So if you want to put it there, if it's one board width, you can do that. You can move it in, make it 2 board widths, it just doesn't matter. Obviously all you'll need to do is just duplicate the amount of wood underneath. So the closer to the front entrance you go, the less wood you'll use, the lighter it's going to be. But you can do them at the back as well, so they have to kind of go in all the way and then up. There's no real benefit to that other than it can kind of change the wind flow dynamic within the hive, and it is something that I've experimented with, and it is one of the iterations later on in this video. But that's it for the second version. That's the solid floor version of my underfloor entrance floor. Right, so the final version of this floor that I'm going to show you is a combination of the two. So we do kind of like half mesh, half solid floor. Uses a little bit more wood, but what it does is it means you can cut your mesh in half. So whereas on the first one you end up with a useless strip like that that you can't do anything with, you can see how flimsy this mesh is, rubbish. This one you just cut your mesh down the middle like that and then you can make 2 floors from that because the mesh is kind of like the probably the most expensive bit, it's at least 50% of the cost. So that's what this floor is, combination of the 2, half solid, half mesh, and it allows the bees to kind of like cluster over maybe the warmer part of the hive. I find they do tend to position themselves in a nice kind of like a warm bit above the solid floor over winter when using this version of the hive. As always though, starts with 2 460mm pieces long. Doesn't matter what the width is, doesn't matter what the depth is. And again, same as always, we start at the back. So next one, similar to the solid floor, we start at the back with this one. So get your wedge, your piece of wood in. So 2 pieces of wood I find is good. You just need to make sure what— depending on the kind of depth of wood that you're using that you get this right. You want it roughly halfway, and then same as the other one, you want to take this piece and put it down, block off that entrance. So you end up with that solid floor there, and then you've got your piece kind of butting it up. Now this is the version where you do actually need to, to cut this piece of wood to do something a little bit different. Uh, I've come to the woods and I've not got my saw, so I can't do this in the video. But basically you want to cut this one pretty much down the middle and have a thin strip of wood. You'll see why at the end. It's just kind of basically like a waste of wood. Um, but again, you're putting that in there, you're doing the same thing as normal. You're getting your 8mm strips and you're putting that in at a 90-degree angle to give you your 8mm entrance slot. So then like that, you can just take your little 8mm spacers out. Really handy just having some 8mm spacers here, makes the job so easy because you know that that's the only dimension that's really important. So you're constantly going back for that 8mm, and then you take the final piece of wood, and what you're doing here is you're closing up that gap there. So you're basically completing the square, which you don't do on any of the other ones. So you end up with something that looks like that, and then what you do on this one is you flip it over and you build an integrated landing board. And this really is an underfloor entrance, this one, like it's Genuinely, you can't access it from the front. You have to come under the hive, so you need to make sure that your hive stand is compatible with that. But it properly baffles wasps. They just can't work out how to get into the hive. It's great. So if you're, if you're doing this to deter wasps, this is the one that I would recommend. It's a little bit heavier, it's a little bit more wood to it, but it is fundamentally a different design to the other 2. This is the one that I tweaked To make it a genuine underfloor entrance. And when I say underfloor entrance, I mean, I mean they have to enter the floor from the bottom as opposed to entering the floor from the side and coming into the bottom of the brood box. So then what you're looking to do is just get that mesh so Same as the other one, just screw it down. If it buckles a little bit, you can just bash it down with a bit of wood. Get it nice and flush first. The screws hold it in place though. And that is what you get left with. And as you can see, I mean, the wood comes up to there on that because I've used the wrong dimension. This is the only one where you really do— it benefits kind of from cutting that piece of wood. So that dimension, you just want to cut it down to maybe like 20 or 30 mil. The only reason that needs to be there is just to give you something to pin the mesh onto and to give you that all-important 8 mil dimension. Um, but yeah, slightly different, this one. Do you know what I mean? From the front, you look at that one, you can't get into the hive from the front. So where is the original one? Gives you that front entrance where you come in and up. This one here, I mean, it works really well on these. These are the pallet floors that we use. Works great with them because they just kind of come in and work their way up underneath. So they need to come up like that— sorry, in like that, and then they've got their internal landing board under there, and then they go up. So it's like it's just an extra baffle, an extra line of defense to stop the wasps. The wasps struggle with these; they really do. Like that, I don't get any wasps in my hives because of these. But these ones, these are like super protectors against wasps. If you've got a bad wasp problem, this is the floor for you. I've not seen anybody else make that floor, so I'm going to call that the Black Mountain Honey Floor. So yeah, we'll pattern that one. I think that's a really cool design. Someone will probably come up and say, oh, there's something wrong with it, but I quite like it. This is probably what I'm going to change all my floors over to. What I really, really do like about this floor though is the hybrid between a solid floor and a mesh floor. So what I like about a mesh floor is that you get that kind of all of the insulation at the top of your hive, and then you have kind of airflow available at the bottom, which reduces condensation and kind of reduces issues with damp over the winter. But then you've got this solid portion at the back there, and what that allows is the— and I always find this— the colony in winter, they tend to cluster over this side. So they prefer this solid area in the winter. You're obviously stopping the drafts getting up to them, providing them a little bit more warmth, keeps it easier for them to make the colony warm. So I really like this floor. I'm really excited about it. I love tweaking things. I love taking a design, and I mean, this design here Superb. Absolutely love this design. This is what kind of all of my floors are on. I'm not going to change them because this works really, really well. This is just my very slight different take on it, just to add on a little bit of a solid floor and to change that baffle ever so slightly. Really, there's not much difference between the two. That one's simpler. This one is heavier. I mean, minor differences, but I think this one's slightly superior in terms of the different baffle that it has. So with that one there as well, what you can do, um, I mean, you can tweak this as much as you possibly want. So if you wanted to, you could bring out that landing board, you could change the strip down there. So if you wanted to have the combination of the mesh and the solid board, but you wanted a front entrance, if you've got a table saw, if you've got different kind of depths of wood, you can do anything you want. I really, I mean, Change this design as much as you want to suit your requirements. That's what I love. Small iterative change will come together and we'll come up with a really cool design that everyone can use. And then people can change it, people can tweak it. That's what design is all about. It's about evolution, working with the environment, working with the materials that you've got to come up with a product that everyone— so everyone can use it. So yeah, that's it. That's option 3. And that's it for the video. I really hope you've enjoyed this one. I've been meaning to do this one for absolutely ages. You'll be amazed at the amount of people that have emailed me or messaged me and said, can I have the cutting list for your underfloor entrances? And I've been saying to people, I'll do a video really shortly with it, and it's taken me ages to get around to it. So I do apologize to anybody who I haven't sent a message back to asking for a cutting list. I think it's better to see it in the flesh in a video, and then you can get real kind of value out of it. So as always, thanks for watching. Please hit the subscribe button, please hit the bell so you're notified of every video. And I'll see you next time. Bye.