Jig to assemble wooden frames

Beautiful day today.  Temperature in the low 50s, bright sunshine.  Shirt sleeve weather.  My bees from all four hives were flying merrily about their entrances so there shouldn't be any problems with constipation.  As reported earlier, the weights of all four hives are in the comfortable levels.

It was warm enough in the shop to start on bee projects for the coming seasons.  In particular, I wanted to make a jig to aid in the assembly of wooden frames.  I have been assembling them one by one but I anticipate I will need 800 or more this year and some sort of aid would be helpful.  The design is simple.  It consists of a rectangular frame made from scrap 3/4 plywood whose length corresponds to the  distance between the end bars (17 inches) and whose width is arbitrary depending upon how many frames are to be assembled at one time. There are a couple of swinging "doors" on each end that, when closed, hold the end bars in a vertical direction.  When open, the "doors" allow the finished frames to be removed from the jig by sliding them sideways.

In use, the doors are closed and latched and end bars are placed in the space between the "door" and the end of the frame.  The top (or bottom, if you wish) bars are placed in the notches in the end bars and nailed or stapled in place.  The entire assembly is turned over to that the bottom bars (or top if you already did the bottoms) can be added similarly and nailed or stapled.  Open the "doors" and remove the finished frames.  The pictures below should explain all.

Checking on hives - January 13, 2015

We've had a couple of polar vortexes (vortices?) already this winter with temps falling into the low single digits.  But there have been interludes of 40+ (F) as well which could have led to excessive honey consumption.  I use a "luggage" scale I purchased on the Internet for about $11 with shipping to weigh my hives.  The device is a plastic handle with some electronics inside and a hook which is intended to capture the handles of a piece of luggage.  But for hive work, it slips under the bottom board and allows one to measure how many pounds (or kg, or g or oz) of force are bearing down on the hive supports when the hive is just lifted off the support.  Do this on both ends, add together the two numbers and you have the weight of the hive.

My four hives (three medium boxes each) weighed on this day from 70.4 to 76 pounds.  The empty (with frames) weight of this arrangement is just under 30 pounds.  This indicates I have at least 40 pounds of wax, bees and honey at this stage of the winter.  I figure there are no more than 4 pounds of wax and 3 or 4 pounds of bees (I could hear their slight buzzing when I put my ear to each hive) so that calculates to at least 30 pounds of honey which is a number I am comfortable with at this stage.