[wholesomedirt]

If I designed a hive stand with a screen using hardware cloth with brackets at the bottom for ipm boards, could that not replace a bottom board on top entrance hives?

 

[Rader Sidetrack]

A bottom board that is built into the hive stand could work, but I think the chances that it will work well are not that promising.

For one thing, assuming you want a consistent bee space between the bottom of the frames and the screen, you may find that more difficult to achieve than expected. The only way to achieve a consistent space is to ONLY use a specific combination of frames & boxes from a given manufacturer. There is a wide variance in dimensions between frames/boxes when looking at different manufacturers. See this article for details:

http://www.beeculture.com/content/beespacearticle.pdf
In certain combinations, the amount of space between the bottom of the frame and the bottom of the box varies as much as 0.4" (slightly more than 3/8").

While a separate bottom board does not eliminate those variances, it does allow you to more easily swap in a different bottom board to solve the problem.

 

[wholesomedirt]

That's a good point. I'm making my own boxes, but it does eliminate solutions.

 

[Kiran]

We made something similar.
We attached two boards to the bottom of the sides of the screen bottom boards.
The boards are as long as the bottom board and wider then the thickness of the hive walls.
They are attached so they project inward to hold mite count boards.
The mite count boards can be inserted through the front slightly below the entrance.

 

[wholesomedirt]

How did it work?

 

[Kiran]

It works well as long as the mite board is flat.
If the board is warped, the debris gets wiped off.