Friday, April 10, 2009

How to make a bee-comb or bee-pick

Well, you all know how I feel about street spam. Whenever I see it on my walks, I pull out the metal posts to use for garden stakes, and throw the signs in a dumpster. They're illegal, so yanking them is just like picking up trash.
I've now found another use for the sign itself: Making a bee pick!
You may recall the one I saw at bee club, with a nice carved handle. It was suggested we could make our own using cardboard and duct tape. But the spam sign is even better. It's durable and waterproof and it comes with perfect corrugated channels for holding those bamboo skewers in alignment.

I cut out a rectangle, taped the bottom edge with foil tape (which may not be necessary), and carefully put a couple drops of Gorilla Glue into every other channel.
Then I inserted the skewers and adjusted them so the middle ones stick up a little more, and laid the pick flat to dry. I put a brick on top to keep the skewers aligned and in the same plane.
Voilà! My very own bee pick.

I'm thinking, looking at the original, that maybe I should have a skewer in every channel, and I should make it wider. The glue probably oozed up around the skewers because of the tape across the bottom. So we'll call this one a prototype. It took all of five minutes to make, so that's OK. I'll make another.

I'm calling it a "bee pick" because "bee comb" is too easily confused with "honeycomb" and the original reportedly started out as two afro-picks taped together. Soon I'll be ready to tease those bees into place, too.

6 comments:

  1. So you could also use that if you had a beehive hairdo?

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  2. Excellent repurposing of trash. I love it that they're illegal. Those are ok here, but billboards in Vermont are illegal.

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  3. Yesterday I watched a bee, a single bee, on my front porch looking for a hole in the bricks on my house. He kept poking into the mortar where the bricks meet. I thought about you with your beepick coming to snag my bee for your colony. (Although one bee doesn't exactly make a swarm, does it?) I'm very eager to have my own bee colony, but I just realized today why I'm procrastinating. I want EXACTLY what you have: a colony in a tree trunk. What are the chances of that happening? Very unlikely. So if I make the commitment to bees I guess I'll have to do the artificial way: with a human-made hive. Bees don't care, right?
    And once again I applaud your recycling mentality.

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  4. Lisa, absolutely!

    Mimi, I lurves it.

    Betts, are they really legal there? Here it is illegal to post advertising on public property. The strip of land next to the street is considered public. as are schools and parks, where these also pop up.

    Pam, you should go look at your trees carefully; you may have a bee tree without knowing it. (I keep seeing more in my neighborhood that the owners know nothing about.) Also, if you have a tree or other cavity that you would like to have bees in, try putting some lemongrass essential oil in it. It's apparently very attractive to swarming bees.

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  5. Thanks for being a fellow "shark" -- (someone who picks up this garbage)

    Yeah I've found household uses for coroplast too.

    Unfortunately condo marketers are also big offenders, and real estate folks who don't remove signs after an open house or weekend.

    Cheers - love the bee article :)

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