Foundationless Frames

Sorry about the gap in posts there, but I’ve been busting my hump in the Urban Hayseed Research Facility (i.e., my backyard)  spreading a unit of cedar chips and several yards of compost here and there.  It’s been 90 something lately.  What a lovely combination.

Anyway, just to have a topic to discuss, I’ll throw out the following.

WARNING: This is serious bee geek talk.  If you don’t keep them or don’t care to read unreasonably technical blather, feel free to go read Google News or something.  I’ll be back with some pretty pictures of plants tomorrow.

If you’re a beekeeper, you may or may not have read/met/made love to Michael Bush.  His site has all kinds of good stuff on it.  He’s got an unconventional organic approach to beekeeping that I like.

One of the things that he advocates is foundationless frames.

OK, I warned you.  But if you’re still here, the frame is the actual rectangular thing hung in the supers, which are, in turn, the boxes that make up the hive.  A super will usually contain 8-10 frames, side by side.  The foundation is a sheet of embossed plastic or wax that is suspended inside the frame on which the bees build their comb.  In general, the bees will follow the embossing on the foundation when they “draw out” the comb.  Thus, the beekeeper “forces” the bees to build comb to his liking– with no drone cells, for instance.  The bees will still make them, but it takes extra effort, and it at least dissuades them to a large degree.

He’s careful to point out that he didn’t invent foundationless frames (even old Langstroth was a fan), but he does a very nice job discussing the pros and cons of that approach.  For one thing, the bees build the comb that they “want” to build.  Instead of drawing out unnaturally large cells because the foundation is imprinted with them, they are able to draw out smaller cells– probably leading to control of varroa mites by reducing the time that the brood cell remains uncapped.

The appeal to me is moving toward a happy middle ground between top bar hives and Langstroth hives.  It allows the bees to do more of their natural thing, but preserves the benefits of the conventional hive (easy expandability, readily available parts, likely better cold weather performance, etc.)  He goes so far as to lay out some of his hives horizontally to eliminate the (potentially dangerous, as demonstrated by my herniated disk) lifting involved in a vertical hive.

Being new to the game, I, of course, started out with the standard stuff.  I have deeps for the brood nest and mediums for the honey supers.  I started out with all worker-cell black plastic foundation.

As I worked with the hive and researched more and more about what I was seeing, I started to wonder if this was yet another case of “we do it that way because we do it that way”.  I was getting advice from people to treat the hives with this and that chemical to control nosema and mites even though I don’t have those things.  I was dissuaded from providing drone cell foundation– either to satisfy the bees need to build drone comb or to cull for varroa mite control (bigger cells are more to their liking).  At one point, I was actually laughed at because I suggested to an experienced beekeeper that the bottom entrance and landing board didn’t make any sense to me. It’s been that way for more than a century, what would you know?

So what about foundationless frames?  Bush contends that the bees actually draw out the comb more quickly on foundationless frames than on foundation.  It seems that bees don’t actually care for foundation that much, but given no alternative, they’ll tend to stick with the embossed pattern.  He goes on to say that while the bees will exercise their pent-up drone comb urges first, if they’re allowed to do so, they’ll eventually get back to making worker cells at a more natural, smaller cell size.

So, how does one get oneself a foundationless frame when one already blew one’s wad on the standard stuff and doesn’t want one’s wife to smack one in one’s head for spending more money on one’s stupid bee hobby?  Apparently, the bees just need a little sumpn to get started on the comb and a level hive.  Ideally, the frame is also placed between some already drawn frames for further guidance on the proper way to make a perty comb.  How’s about just stapling a short strip of some cut up foundation to the top bar of an empty frame and jamming it in there?

Great idea.  Let’s do that. (cut, cut, staple, staple)…

Super.  Now, because Washington is going bananas, and Adams is… well, kinda pathetic (though, it seems to have a laying queen now, or some very prolific laying workers), I decided to give it a couple of frames of Washington’s brood.  While I had the hive open, I added another deep on top of the second one with alternating foundation and foundationless frames.

Part of the rationale was that the two lower boxes are absolutely jammed.  I’d expect them to have left some space on the outer frames, but there’s brood from wall to wall in both.  I figured that they might appreciate a little extra space.  I didn’t want the queen to expand the brood into the honey super, and I didn’t like the looks of the queen excluder’s performance the short time I had it on there.  I’d already swapped the brood boxes to get the queen down lower, but… I had no idea where she was now in that crowd… or if there are actually two (as a result of my consolidating them after the swarm).

So, what the heck, right?

OK… roll forward about two weeks or so.

My First Foundationless Frame

I opened up that box and found, to my surprise, that they’d completely drawn out (and filled with nectar) one, partially completed a couple others, and only left one empty.  Interestingly, there was no brood in any of the cells.  Her Highness/es are keeping the family together downstairs, and that’s OK by me.  The empties that I’d replaced into the brood boxes were already drawn out as well, but, to be honest, I didn’t want to bug them anymore than necessary in the heat, so I didn’t go through the whole hive again this time.

I’ve also got a medium honey super on the top just because I have it, and they seem like they might actually use it.  It’s wired wax foundation, but I’d guess it matters a bit less when they’re just going to be using it for honey.

There ya go… I apologize to anyone whose patience I’ve tested.  I promise, tomorrow we’ll discuss reaching that point in the summer where it seems like someone’s thrown the switch on growth.  Between the raspberries, blueberries, squash, beans, and brassicas, I can barely keep up with the harvest– much less weeding and pruning– at this point.