In this first episode of the premium "Wooden Section Honey" series, Laurence Edwards walks viewers through the complete assembly of a wooden section honey rack, from handling the four corner pieces to installing laths, inserting wax foundation, and finalizing the rack with plastic sheets, a blanking cedar piece, and a spring clip. He demonstrates practical techniques such as wetting groove backs to prevent wood splitting, bending finger joints, and positioning foundation, while noting the time investment (about 35 minutes for one rack) and the trade‑offs between buying pre‑assembled racks versus DIY assembly for cost savings. The video also explains the importance of maintaining proper bee space using plastic sheets between rows and sealing the end with a spring clip to prevent bees from entering voids. Edwards advises preparing the racks early in the season—ideally over winter—so they can be installed on colonies as soon as the first super is needed, and hints at upcoming episodes covering colony preparation, swarming management, and honey harvesting.
Chapters
I've got yet another series that's exclusively available on my premium membership platform. Today we're going to look at wooden section honey, and in this series we're going to talk about absolutely everything from the beginning to the end— how to assemble the racks, how to put them together, how to put the foundation in there, how to get the hives ready, setting up the boxes on the hives, moving through to harvesting, packaging, and even selling the honey as well. First off, massive thank you again to Thorn Beekeeping. They provided me with both an assembled honey section rack and one that I need to assemble myself. In this video, which is the first episode in the series, I'm going to show you the full assembly of the honey section rack, how to get it to the point where it's ready to put it onto the bees. So in terms of the honey section rack, it's the exact same process that I followed in the Ross Round video. I'm going to give you a really quick summary of it here. You take your 4 corners of the section rack, make sure that the handles are the right way round, connect it all together, glue and pin it, make sure it's completely square, Turn it upside down, put the laths in exactly the same sequence as you did on the Ross Rounds, thin on one side, thick on the other side, pin them all into place, and it should look something like this. Now that was loads quicker than the previous video, and what I said on the previous video is if you're gonna go down this route and you've not got much time, these are incredibly fiddly to put together. They're fine, it's not like it's a difficult process, but there's lots of nails, lots of tapping in, Lots of gluing. It's small bits of wood. It took me about 35 minutes to put the first one together. And okay, I was doing it while I was doing a video at the same time, so it's a little bit more difficult because you're filming it. It does take quite a while to do it. If I was going to get more, and I am going to buy some more of these, I would 100% go down the assembled route. But that's just me. I've not got much time. There's quite good savings to be made by assembling them yourself. So if you've got the time, you've got the skills, maybe go down that route. So this is what the boxes look like once they're complete. When you buy the assembled rack, this is what it comes like. Everything is complete and ready to go. I'm going to show you now what it comes like if you buy the unassembled rack, and I'm going to show you how to put all of those bits together. So first thing you need to do is take your wooden section and you need to apply some water to the back of these grooves. That means that when you bend these and clip them over, they're much less likely to break, although I've definitely broken some of them. Putting the water on the back though really helps. You're going to fold these over, but first thing, turn that over and we're just going to put some water here Here, here, and here. Give it a couple of seconds just to soak in. Really does help stop the breakages. Then all you're gonna do is you're just gonna bend that round. Feels like you're gonna break it. It is a little bit unnerving. You bend it round like this. Do it all the way round until you get the 4th one done. Then you wanna take it round so it forms a square, and you just wanna slot those grooves in together like that. This is what it should look like at this point. Perfect square. You can see it's not split on the ends. Finger joints just go in there, and then I leave that one bit open like that. This is the easiest way that I've found to do it. You're then going to take a piece of foundation, and there's no easy way to do this. You just kind of want to slot it in, get it into the grooves as best as you possibly can. And once you're confident that piece of wax foundation is in as best as you can possibly get it, you're going to close these finger joints down here. Don't force it in too hard and don't force any of the other joints either. Then that should form a complete square like that. Once you've got that all in, you can tweak it, make sure it's completely square again, and you can just play about with that foundation just to get it into any of the grooves if you need to. Ideally, you want that in the center as best as you possibly can, but it would take you quite a while to get that perfect every time. I'd say what you're seeing here is good enough. So once you've got your section looking like this, you just need to do that 32 more times. It's a little bit fiddly. It's quite therapeutic. You can just sit there. It doesn't take much brainpower at all. Put on a decent TV programme, maybe a YouTube video. Try and get through them all until you've got all 32 of them complete. So you can see in this box here now, I've just been working my way through. As and when you complete them, you just pop them in there, and then in between every single row, you place one of these plastic sheets. Seems a little bit strange, but what you're doing with this sheet here is giving the bees the ability to be able to maintain the bee space. That means you won't get loads of wild comb drawn all over the place. So don't forget to put these in. You get enough for them to go all the way up against every single section rack. So just fill the box now, make sure it's full, and then I'll show you how to close it up at the end. Once you've got all your section racks in there, this is what it should look like. You can see we've got 32 section racks in there, and then you get this gap at the end like that. All you do with that bit at the end is you take this final piece of blanking cedar, pop that down like that, and then you wanna take your spring clip and you just push your spring clip in like that, and it holds everything nice and tight. So you can see in there, I've got my spring clip now. That's holding everything nice and firm. The bees can't get up into this void because you're using it on the sealed end. Make sure you've got the sealed end with the spring clip on. And then that's it, you've got everything set, ready to go on the bees. And there we go, that is the section rack complete. So in the next episode, we're going to talk about how you prepare the bees to put that section rack on. I would recommend getting this done as early in the season as you possibly can. I've prepared most of mine over winter, and as soon as the colonies are ready for their first super, that's when I'm going to put my section rack on. It can take the bees a little bit of time to actually get in there and start to draw it out. You want to make sure that they've got sufficient time in order to do that, and we're going to try and congest the bees as much as we possibly can to force them to work on that section rack, but we're also going to try and manage swarming at the same time. We'll cover all of that on future episodes of our Section Honey series.
