This is as much fun as peeking at others people's kitchens on Houzz.
I'll ante in with my set-up. Backstory: I am a 73 y.o, small, woman who keeps 30 hives in 10-frame deeps, even for supers.
My hive stands are made up of plywood panels on top of shipping pallets, raised off the ground by cinder blocks. The total height is about 14". I usually keep two hive stacks per pallet (in the summer) and I routinely stand on the pallet to work the bees as they come out of winter in my triple deeps. So my feet are at bottom board level, which is akin to Peter's idea of putting hives directly on the ground.
As I add boxes and super up (my stacks are a daunting 5 or 6 deeps high by mid July) I work the hives using a simple scaffold made for me by another beekeeper who also ran tall hives. The scaffold is made up of two pretty ordinary sawhorses (made of poplar wood for lightness) topped with two, 2' x 12" pine boards for a working platform. I use a 3-step folding ladder to get myself up and down from the platform. After I've topped the hives with their fourth box, further attention requires me to stand on my scaffold to work them. I take any box above the third one off and set it on the scaffold's platform (on a temp base to avoid smushing bees underneath them). Depending on my plans, I might remove and stack two of the upper boxes on top of each other, while I work on a lower one, Generally, the scaffold is placed between two hives (on a pallet) and I work the upper boxes from the central space between the hives, while the lower boxes are worked from ground level on the outer side.
Deep boxes full of honey are a stretch for me at the end of the summer, but I routinely remove frames and use dump boxes to keep my bees quiet and safe throughout the year, so that's what I do. I can lift the 60-80 lbs of a deep full of honey off the stack and move it to the scaffold, but putting it back on, especially if I have to lift it up more than a box-height above the scaffold is not easy, or even possible at times.. But I can always slap on an empty box and move the frames into it, if I must.
I have one of those folding aluminum benches and I use it frequently, but my ground is rough and I find it a bit tippy. I don't like trusting full boxes of bees on it, and I can't safely carry full boxes down off it when I've used it to a climb up and poke my nose into high box. If I got a better interim platform/step between the bench surface and ground level it would be more useful for that.
But by far the most useful apparatus I use is a little, folding metal stool (I think it's made by Werner) that's about 13" tall, with a flat, step-ladder type of top. I sit on it whenever I am working hives, whether the box is on the ground or on the scaffold's platform. I hate leaning down over a hive and feel much more comfortable sitting on my little stool beside it. It's not the dead weight of the deep boxes that causes my back to ache; it's the endless stooping down that wears me out. But I can work all day sitting on my perch.
The stools have long since lost their labels, but I think they were called something silly, like an "Up-Up" and were intended for use in a kitchen to reach upper cabinets. One winters in my pantry, but otherwise one is stashed next to each of my small groups of hives. My only concession to the energy needed to work my bees is that I use the bucket on our farm tractor to move the scaffold pieces around from group to group and deliver fresh boxes and equipment from the storeroom to the hives. If I had something like a Gator, that would be even better, but I can't afford one of those.
Sitting while working bees is so much better. If you haven't tried that, you may find it makes a huge difference.
Nancy
***********************************************
The BEE-L mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned
LISTSERV(R) list management software. For more information, go to:
http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html
|