Hi, I’m Stewart Spinks and welcome to Episode 98 of my podcast Beekeeping Short and sweet.

This week saw the completion of the Top Bar Hive build, we’ve once again been battered by Winter storms, and excitedly, we started the Honey Paw Langstroth Hive project, so stay tuned for all the latest updates.Get the very latest podcast as it's released by visiting www.patreon.com/norfolkhoneyCheck out Honey Paw Hives in the UK at Modern BeekeepingHoney Paw outside the UK can be view at Honey Paw Hives

Before we get started into this week’s podcast I want to give a shout out to Honey Paw Hives who are very kindly sponsoring, in part, our podcasts for this active season. You’ll hear lots more about Honey Paw Hives as we go through the season and lots of the podcasts will feature the Langstroth Poly Hives as most of our YouTube videos are going to be based on the season-long collaboration we have with them.

I’ve had these hives for a couple of seasons now and I certainly wouldn’t have agreed to another collaboration with them if I didn’t think they were great products.

Here in the UK you can find out all about them by visiting the website of  Modern Beekeeping where the full range is on display and outside the UK take a look at the Honey Paw website itself and of course, I’ll put links to both websites in the podcast notes that accompany this week’s show.

Honey Paw Poly Langstroth Bee Hives, designed for beekeepers because they’re designed by beekeepers.

This month seems to be really racing away, January seemed to stretch out way ahead of me and whether it was the New Year hangover or something I don’t know but we barely seemed to trip into February and here we are with just over one week to go before it’s March and the Spring equinox will be upon us and we all know what happened here in the UK last year, I have pictures of swarm cells to prove it!

With all of that in mind, I decided it was time to get stuck into several projects as if I don’t have enough to be going on with. The major one is the Honey Paw and we’ve been making up brood bodies and nuc bodies ready for painting which we started today actually. To be honest these are pretty much the only thing you need to make up as everything else comes preformed and ready for painting. There are a couple of exceptions which I’ll talk about another time but mostly, we just put a little polyurethane wood glue on the joints and pushed them together.

So today we set about painting the boxes, being polystyrene you need to be careful what paint you select or you could find your precious hive parts dissolving away! I opt for smooth masonry paint basically because I can get it in big tins and normally someone somewhere is selling off old stock in some drab colour that no one wants.

This week it was the turn of UK DIY store B&Q, they had an offer on a Dulux weather shield masonry paint listed in the green section of their website filter system. It looked a little light and was called “Frosted Lake” so I pictured a kind of light or pale green colour.

The best thing was it was really cheap so I got three 5 litre tins of it.

Turns out that “Frosted Lake” is actually “Baby Blue” and not Green at all. Oh well, never mind, it really isn’t that big a deal, too late now anyway as we’ve given pretty much everything a first coat, including my nephew who came along to lend a hand. I think he got more paint on his hoodie than on the hives which is why it’s always good to give young relatives back to their respective parents at the end of the day. 

We painted a total of a dozen floors and roofs, 36 brood bodies or deep boxes, 12