Tag: layens hive

Black Friday Sale: Save on Beekeeping Supplies

Happy Thanksgiving! I’m thankful for you and hope you have a wonderful and blessed holiday! This Friday, I’ll be discounting many items on the website. It’s a great time to prepare for catching swarms next spring, and I’ll be reducing the base price of swarm traps to $80. In addition, frames will be reduced by $1.00 each, and that’s before any bundle or quantity discounts are applied.

Additionally, I will offer a $10 discount on the Hopkins hive stand, a lightweight yet sturdy stand featuring adjustable feet and anchor points for tie-down straps. This stand is made especially for the 20-frame insulated Layens hive but can also be used for Langstroth hives.

If you’ve been considering buying Layens hives to start or increase your apiary next year, this Friday is the time to act! On Friday, my current stock of insulated, 20-frame Layens hives will be discounted by 10% to $500, available only for current stock (no backorders).

Beekeeping tools will also be discounted to the prices I usually charge in person at events, and the basic beekeeping tool bundle will be on sale for < $40.00.

Need Sodbuster merchandise? My “Something of a Sodbuster” and “Keeping Bees…Naturally” T-shirts will be drastically discounted to $10.00 each, while supplies last. Signed copies of the children’s book, “Don’t Fear the Bees”, will also be available for $10.00.

No coupon is needed; these prices will be automatically updated on the website, but will be available for one day only. In addition to these discounts, I’m still offering free shipping on orders over $50 (excluding 20-frame hives). The Black Friday sale page is available at this link: https://suburbansodbuster.com/product-category/black-friday-sale/.

Orders from this sale will be processed and shipped after the holiday weekend, in the order they’re received.

I appreciate your past business, and I look forward to helping you in the future.

Ozarks Homesteading Expo 2024

It’s almost time for the Ozarks Homesteading Expo, which will be on September 6-7, 2024 at the Webster County Fairgrounds in Marshfield, MO. This will be a fantastic event for anyone wanting to learn to live a more independent, sustainable life. There are many great speakers scheduled, demonstrations of traditional skills such as animal processing, wood milling, blacksmithing, etc., and over 150 vendors with goods to equip your sustainable life.

Visit ozarkshomesteading.com for more information and to buy tickets to the Expo.

I’ll have a booth at the Expo, where I’ll have books, Layens hives and swarm traps available, along with a new hive stand available for the first time. I’ll also be speaking at 2:00 pm on Saturday on the topic: “Keeping Bees Doesn’t Have to be Hard”. I hope you’ll come by to say hi!

The new hive stand, described in the video below, has been developed by Kris Hopkins of hopkinshomesteadstore.com, where the Hopkins family sells high quality steel raised garden beds. Visit their website and use code “SODBUSTER” for a 5% discount.

Splitting 1 Honeybee Colony into 2 in the Same Hive!

When you might be short on extra hives to house bees, but need to split a colony, it’s possible to use multiple entrances of a horizontal hive to facilitate a split, housing both resulting colonies in the same hive. In these videos I prepare for the split by moving the colony to use the central hive entrance, then split it into two colonies, each residing in one end of the hive.

Conversion Hive Construction

There is a series of videos on my YouTube channel about a nucleus colony of bees that I have migrated from Langstroth frames to Layens frames, in a hive that I built to be able to hang both frame sizes parallel to each other. Some had asked about plans for this hive. Although I don’t have documented plans, I did make this video to document and describe the construction of the hive: