Honey house location?

[Beetime]

I want to build a honey house on my property. I currently have some hives on my farm but I send my honey supers several miles away to be extracted. My question is if I build a honey house in the same location as my hives, will the bees smell the honey in the honey house and will it cause problems? Thanks for any input.

[odfrank]

After 28 years of keeping bees in outapiaries, I now have most of my hives about 30 ft. away from my extracting room. Best move I ever made. The extracting room must be bee-tight. And mouse tight.

Only two lifts to pull the honey, off the hive onto the blower stand, off the stand onto four wheeled dollies. I am saving lifting about four tons a year. And I never forget to bring anything along when I check the bees, it is all just a few steps away.

[Beetime]

odfrank,
I am designing this project from scratch. I do have a wooden building that could possibly be made bee tight. What is your honey house made of, wood, blocks, brick?
If you don't mind me asking, how big is it.
How many hives do you have? Having the honey house so close to the hives doesn't cause any problems?

Thanks,
Steve

[Michael Bush]

I agree with O.D. As long as it's bee tight closer is much better. Less work. Less problems. But you have to have any honey house bee tight.

[mainelybees]

When we built our new house I claimed the basement. It is a partial daylight basement with a regular door rather than a bulkhead, and three big windows. I divided it into three rooms. A small room, 8' by 15' with a pocket door to save space, plumbed with hot and cold running water in a huge sink. This room also doubles as my "hot" room with a propane heater mounted on the wall and a ceiling fan. A larger room 16' by 16' is my processing room. Here I have a Maxant 20 frame ext., uncapping tank, clarifyer, honey pump, settling tanks and bottling tank. The other half of the basement is my woodworking shop. Because I process honey for other people I am always getting bees in the shop.

Now, here is the point to all this...I use flourecent lights in all three rooms, when I wired for lights and recepticles I added one incondesent light "lamp holder" ( just has a plain lightbulb with a pull chain) in each room. After an evening of honey work I leave all the lightbulbs on, the bees all get attracked to these lights because they are warm, before turning in for the night I take a paper shopping bag, pull it gently up over the cluster of bees and give the chain a little shake, then just take the bees outside and shake them out of the bag. So far we haven't had any bees in the upstairs.

The closer the better. It definitely will make things more enjoyable.

David

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Maine-ly Bees
David Wallace and Family
Bowdoinham, ME
mainelybees@aol.com

[odfrank]

My extracting room is a subdivided third of a three door garage building. It is wood frame and stucco. It has a tilt-up garage door made beetight with adhesive foam strips.
The screened windows have bee-escape screens. It measures about 10 X 28, but only because that is what was available. It is plenty big to extract and store supers for about 50 hives. My shop and equipment storage is in the other two bays of the garage. Nothing special, but it works. And it came with a floor drain when I bought it, was built to be a steam cleaning bay. Got lucky. But that is what a lot of life is about. Luck