Wood preservation

[buckmaster]

Not to sound like a broken record, I've read the past posts, but my question has not been answered.  I live in New England and am building my first hive (a top bar).  It is very well ventilated and will be placed in the shade, so overheating will not be a problem.  Condensation will however, high humidity is a fact of life in this area of the country.  I am using a water based stain on the outside of the hive (Cabot brand) but I would like to use something on the interior of the hive.  It is wooden, made of old fir boards and plywood.  I am considering lineseed oil or another food-grade oil as a penetrant/preservative.  Does anyone have experience with oiling the inside of a hive?

[BigRog]

From whqat I know the bees will seal it with propolis

[Jerrymac]

Why in the shade? I think that would cause more of a condensation problem and would be a better habitat for mites and beetles.

The bees will take care of sealing the wood on the inside.

[buckmaster]

the weather is so variable in our area, we can have searing sun, high humidity, rain, high winds... and the weather can change in a heartbeat.  i just don't want the hive to overheat if the weather changes and i'm not home.  i'm one of those people who likes to invent things, so the top-bar-hive has a unique design and i'm not sure how well it will work.  i'd rather not take the chance of overheating.  i suppose if a spell of wonderful weather was forecast i could move the hive.  the difference between shade and open field is about 50', so we could easily move it.

[Michael Bush]

The bees will seal the inside better than you ever could.  Let them.

[buckmaster]

thank you for the quick responses.  as i mentioned, this my first time doing this, it's actually something my girlfriend and i are doing together, so we are both learning about bee keeping as we go along.  she's left construciton of the hive up to me.  i used some plans i got off the web for a californian tbh and changed them around bit to fit our climate and materials better.  i'll post pic's on my site as soon as i have a chance.  i expect this to be quite a learning experience, in terms of hive construction.  we began keeping goats a few years ago, with no prior experience, we look back at some of the fences and housing strategies we tried back then and laugh.  we underestimated how smart the goats were and what they could figure out, i assume the same thing will happen with the bees.