From: Barry Birkey <barry@birkey.com>
Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2001 09:28:35 -0500
To: <BiologicalBeekeeping@yahoogroups.com>
Subject: RE: foundation size

Hello Scott -

> Just to make sure, I took out some sheets of the "new" 4.9 Jerry Hayes
> recently shipped to me. It measured between 4.8 and 4.9 after at least 5
> different measurements on as many sheets. Am I measuring this incorrectly?
> Or did I just get lucky? Has anyone else besides me found this to be the case
> with the "original" 4.9?

I'm not surprised and it sounds to me that you are measuring it correctly.
Even the 'new' 4.9 foundation is going to vary in size a bit but it should
only vary 4.9 or smaller whereas the first run varied 4.9 and larger.

> Since I
> am now using what appears to be 4.9 for the first step, how will this impact
> the bees? Will they continue with the 4.9 "blueprint" or will the build
> larger comb that matches their present size.

It shouldn't matter whether you use a starter strip or a full sheet of
foundation, the bees will only regress down in cell size a certain amount
each time. From the experience of myself and others, it seems they will only
regress about .2mm at a time. As long as you have 'some' foundation for them
to key off of, they will do the rest. This is why it is recommended that you
only use starter strips if your bees are coming off of a cell size of 5.4 or
so as it will take at least two regressions before they would draw 4.9
foundation out in a decent manner. I have a bunch of photos that I haven't
made live yet from last year when I went through this with 2 swarms. Here
are a couple of pages to look at that show how the bees handled the 4.9
starter strips and then full sheets of foundation.

http://www.beesource.com/eob/4dot9/h2comb4.htm
This is comb built from starter strips. It measured 5.2mm cell size. The
bees came from 5.4mm comb.

http://www.beesource.com/eob/4dot9/h1stripcomb2.htm
Here you can see they built the smaller cell on top but got quite large
(7.1mm) on the bottom half as they were using this comb for honey, not
brood. Even found eggs in some of the cells so drones were on the way.

http://www.beesource.com/eob/4dot9/49.2ndreg5.htm
You can see now on the 2nd regression (shakedown) that they are now drawing
some 4.9mm cells but still with a lot of transition cells mixed in. From
this point on, I could interject frames of 4.9 foundation and they would
draw it out just fine .... but they died over the winter. I'm now using
these combs to work the two hives down that made it through the winter.

Regards,
Barry