Hi Sarah

Last year I assembled a stand inside observation hive with 6 brood
frames and two shallows on each side, queen excluders below the
shallows and then put shallows right accross to make a look up
through the combs roof - it was quite a thing - I had four queens - a
mission to combine, a permanent feeded at the top and 50 honey filled
super frames accross the roof. The whole thing weighed in at 350+kg,
and had a UV tube on the inside and flourescent marked queens and
drones.

People could go in and tunr on the UV tube and could see the queens
and drones instantly.

It was very difficult to carry, extremely heavy, and generated so
much heat that people who stood inside the perspex walled insides for
longer than a few minutes came out with something like heat
exhaustion.

Dismantling it was slighly more of a problem as when I began to do
this the bees began to fight and soon I had three balled queens and
was forced to set the hive up with the remaining queen - it occupied
three brood boxes (had to add some combs to get the spacing right)
and five supers - three weeks later it emitted a large number of
swarms (I caught three) and the whole hive depopulated to the point
that I have one little cape laying worker colony which is the proud
remnant of some of my best beehives.

Fun, expensive (It cost me about US$600/SAR3600 which in my neck of
the woods is quite a lot) and destroyed a lot of perfectly good
production hives.

If you would like dimensions so you too can do this, give me a shout
- it's worth it!!

Keep well

Garth