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Foundationless and (some) frameless honey in Santa Monica, July 16, 2012

125K views 231 replies 30 participants last post by  cerezha 
#1 · (Edited)
I am in the process of switching to all foundationless in my two Lang hives permitted in Santa Monica, CA.

To me,the foundationless approach has many advantages:
(a) easy to build, no special care required (waxing, wiring, foundation installation etc);
(b) in combination with mediums - it is universal for all bee-hive related tasks (brood chamber, honey supers etc);
(c) freshly made wax, no "drawn comb" worries, no old comb issues;
(d) easy to extract honey especially at the small scale (hobbyist type), crush-and-strain, no special equipment required; shape of the comb is not important; there are byproducts of extraction - honey-vine and wax.
(e) bees choose proper (for them!) size for the comb cells; they maintain proper bee-space in accordance to their needs.

I am harvesting a few totally foundationless "frames" every few weeks. Note that there is only a top bar from the standard frame has been shown in one picture.

Disclaimer: Welcome to this thread. This post has no intention to discuss comparison between foundation and foundationless, frame or frameless approaches. It is for pictures of your foundationless/frameless achevements in Lang hive! Please, feel free to post pictures of your foundationless/frameless latest honey crop here. Sergey
 

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#184 · (Edited)
end of October-November 2013

Well
I sort of abandon the beesource. There is short update:
My bees are doing great. All beehives are completely foundationless and "frameless" - instead frames, I am using top bars of my own design. Officially, I am permitted to have only two beehives (city requirement). These are my production hives. I am collecting in average 10 kilos of honey per 2-3 month "Sunny California" cycle. One hive is vertical design and another - horizontal. I am trying to compare them side-by-side.
It seems to me that vertical one is a winner (as many of you predicted).
 

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#186 · (Edited)
end of October-November 2013

O, hi Oldtimer!
You were right that vertical design is more efficient!
As for your questions. Red thing are my top-bars, which now completely replace the classical frames. Now - I am frameless. On the picture, you could see how it works for horizontal hive.

As for entrances - originally, I had some problem with robbing in the horizontal hive (suspecting vertical as a robber). As a result, all entrances were reduced to minimal as on the pictures above. I noticed that bees with small entrances were much calmer (make sense) in all hives. So, when robbing faded away, I increase the entrance but not too much - it is ~3" now. Bees are very calm and there are no bees at the porch at night. I did experiment - open entrance to normal and immediately got bees on the porch and they were agitated. I guess, for my situation, this entrance size is optimal.

How is your bees? Wintered well?
 

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#187 ·
Re: end of October-November 2013

Hmm well those entrances might be OK for winter but next season when you see them getting a bit crowded they'll do better if you open them up some more, small entrances also make them more inclined to swarm. The long hive might be OK how it is, but the tall hive will better handle a bigger front door.

Yes my own bees doing well although had major swarming problems due to extended dearth after early flow. But very pleased with things over all, selling bees flat out, just done the accounts made record money in October.
 
#189 ·
Re: end of October-November 2013

Hmm well those entrances might be OK for winter but next season when you see them getting a bit crowded they'll do better if you open them up some more, small entrances also make them more inclined to swarm. The long hive might be OK how it is, but the tall hive will better handle a bigger front door...
Many thanks for advise - I did not think about swarming. In fact, they did not swarm at all this year. I shall monitor them more carefully. For now, they seems OK - I do not see much traffic jam at the entrance. When I opened up entrances completely - bees actively used only 3-4" length of the entrance. Thus, I revert to smaller entrance.
 
#190 ·
Re: end of October-November 2013

What is the depth of the supers? They look pretty deep, are you having any problems with comb collapse or attachment to the side of the box?
Yes, I had a huge problem with collapsing (what a mess)! Problem has been solved by adding thin metal sides to the top bars. The bar on the picture above in fact has sides. It is necessary only for deep-frame format. For mediums, sides are not necessary. As for comb attachments - it depends. In most cases bees obey "bee-space". They attached deep-size honeycomb in horizontal hive when I was using only top-bars. It has perfect sense, because comb was heavy and bees were smarter than me. When I start using sides for deep-format, bees stop attachments - it is so easy to work with long hive! For medium bars - they do attachments rarely. The general rule - completed honey-comb should not stay in the hive for longer than a month. After that, bees could do all kinds of art on the comb. I have a special tool to cut comb from the sides. Usually, if it cut once, they did not attach again (have no idea why).
 
#193 ·
November 2013

what brand of suit is that you're using? might be good for us too.
Hi Jackson! I am using Pigeons Mnt. ventilated beesuit, but I am not very happy with it. It starts deteriorating after second season. From another hand, I was looking for suit to my wife and probably will buy another PM ventilated suit because could not find better option.
Do you have to level your hive to make sure the combs come off straight down?
When I installed beehives, yes, I leveled them, but not so precise. I would imagine that soil may move and level is off now. Nevertheless, there is no problem with comb unless it is really huge comb.
 
#192 ·
Re: Small inspection, July 16, 2013

Anyone tried having their bees draw comb on a wired foundationless frame? Would the wire help hold the comb on the frame better enough that you could actually harvest the honey on the extractor without it falling off the frame since it's foundationless?
 
#194 ·
Re: Small inspection, July 16, 2013

Anyone tried having their bees draw comb on a wired foundationless frame? ...
I used to have foundationless frames with wires (leftovers from normal Langs). Since I crush-and-strain, it was difficult to use them. I know that Michael Bush from this forum extracts foundationless frames on the regular basis. I doubt he is using a wire. If comb is attached to all 4 sides of the frame - it is amazingly strong! When foundationless, bees have a tendency to build very thick honeycomb - it may be a problem with centrifugal extraction - uneven thickness of the comb. But look at the pictures above in this thread - many people posted pictures of the wonderful absolutely straight honeycomb!
 
#195 ·
Re: Small inspection, July 16, 2013

thanks for the quick reply, i just started with beekeeping and was thinking of foundationless frames for better varroa mites control, I got very inspired reading your thread when you switched to foundationless :)
Did the bees built on the wired frames just as it did on the unwired? I mean did it have any effect as to the comb shape and size?
From your experiment, how did you encourage bees to build on all sides of the frame or did they just do so as long as the frame is 4 cornered?
Did they build a lot of drone cells on the brood frame and did it had any effect on your hive? But I read though that you didn't encounter any swarming problems :)
Thank you :)

I used to have foundationless frames with wires (leftovers from normal Langs). Since I crush-and-strain, it was difficult to use them. I know that Michael Bush from this forum extracts foundationless frames on the regular basis. I doubt he is using a wire. If comb is attached to all 4 sides of the frame - it is amazingly strong! When foundationless, bees have a tendency to build very thick honeycomb - it may be a problem with centrifugal extraction - uneven thickness of the comb. But look at the pictures above in this thread - many people posted pictures of the wonderful absolutely straight honeycomb!
 
#197 · (Edited)
Re: Small inspection, July 16, 2013

thanks for the quick reply, i just started with beekeeping and was thinking of foundationless frames for better varroa mites control, I got very inspired reading your thread when you switched to foundationless :)
Hi Jackson
Foundationless is tricky. I do not know how much experience with normal beekeeping you have. For novice, I would suggest to start from typical for your area way of beekeeping and than once your bees established you could evolve into foundationless. My theory is that bees actually learned how to use foundationless frame as a guide. They would learn quicker if you could give them an example what is good (a few frames with foundation or pre-made straight comb). At the beginning, it is always advisable to place foundationless between two straight combs. There is really good web-site by Michael Bush - you could learn a lot from this:
http://www.bushfarms.com/bees.htm

Did the bees built on the wired frames just as it did on the unwired? I mean did it have any effect as to the comb shape and size?
From your experiment, how did you encourage bees to build on all sides of the frame or did they just do so as long as the frame is 4 cornered?
I did not notice any problems with wired frames. As for attachments - look on the pictures above posted by the people who uses foundationless frames - you could notice that comb often is not attached to the bottom bar and only partially attached to the sides. This is how bees build naturally. Thus - I figured out that bottom bar is not essential, remove it! Sides - so-so, you could leave them or remove, bees do not care - it is more for your convenience.

Did they build a lot of drone cells on the brood frame and did it had any effect on your hive? But I read though that you didn't encounter any swarming problems :)
Thank you :)
This is really controversial topic. Many believes that bees built comb exclusively for drones on empty foundationless frame(s). It is weird. Yes, first comb they do build on my top bars always has a huge cells, but it is not for drones - it is used for nectar ... than some magic (really) happened - with time, the comb on the same bar is transformed into smaller cells, which is used for honey or brood, not for drones. I was never able to observe this transition - I often see freshly made large cells comb with nectar in it and later the same frame/bar has normal cells. In all my hives drones always occupy just 10-20 cells on the periphery of the brood (sometime honey) frames/bars. Bees did not swarm this year at all. Last year, two hives swarmed once each giving to me two powerful new beehives! As a swarm control measure, I am using "checkerboarding method" developed by WALT WRIGHT Elkton.
 
#199 ·
it is time to get ready for Californian "winter", November 5th, 2013

I did full inspection today. It looks like my bees are ready for the "winter" - they compacted the nest and have enough honey storage. Storage was slightly dispersed in the hive(s) - I consolidated honey frames and reduced empty space. Each hive has 2-3 frames of nectar and quite a bit of brood. On the pictures - some random frames from my today's inspection.
 

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#201 ·
Re: My new top-bar design in deep-format

thank you for your so thorough reply Sergey, it's just my first month into beekeeping and I do have a lot to learn. I'm currently using foundations and will continue to do so until I learn enough, but will of course start learning and will closely follow your good lead :)
 
#208 ·
Re: Inspection Jan 28 2014 Happy New Year by the way!

Myself and bees are doing well. We are treatment-free and it is ours 4th (? I do not remember!) season :) So far, bees are healthy, there is no indication of any problems as far as I can tell. My horizontal hive was slow for a while. I attributed this to old (original!!!!) queen - the mother of all beehives around. Girls were reluctant to replace her but they did it a few weeks ago (I think so - I was not introduced yet to Her Majesty). So, the horizontal hive is catching up:
 

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#209 · (Edited)
Re: Inspection Jan 28 2014

Interesting story was happened with another vertical hive, which is situated on the roof - my garden is too small for all my girls :(
This hive was robbed - literally all bees were killed in the fight, but they do not let robbers inside the hive! Very honorable bees! I was so disgusted with myself (that I did not noticed earlier) - I just left hive "as is." Than, a few weeks later I noticed some activity in the hive - new bees find a new home :) Few months later it is booming! We started from single medium box and today I added 5th! Probably I need to split this "house." On the pictures before and now just before adding 5th box.
 

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#210 ·
Re: Inspection Jan 28 2014

That is really wonderful Sergey, could it be a new colony or maybe a few workers and the queen survived the robbery and started rebuilding themselves, but when they were weakened by the robbery weren't you worried wax moth would go in and destroy the combs left behind?
 
#212 ·
Re: Inspection Jan 28 2014

... weren't you worried wax moth would go in and destroy the combs left behind?
Hi Jackson! Nice to hear form you!
Probably it could happens, but I was so disturbed by this accident, that I simply did not think about wax-moth (AND SHB)... At the time I decided to disassemble the hive - it was already occupied to my great surprise! I like your idea that queen survived and rebuild the colony - this way I could feel less quilt :) Have a great bee-season!
 
#211 ·
Re: Inspection Jan 28 2014

last story for today is my little nuc, which was created from nothing. It is strange story - when we moved beehive to my neighbor, some bees refused to relocate and keep returning to my place. We gave them empty nuc and returned back to their new home. we kept doing so for literally a week. Nevertheless, at the end, I find a pathetic tiny group of bees getting ready to spend night on the roof (another roof!). It was so pitiful picture :( - I placed a nuc-box next to them and they quickly get inside the box. It was the beginning a tiny colony. Somehow they got a mother, the queen - I find a tiny capped brood a few weeks later. I supported them by giving a bar of uncapped brood twice, but it was after they had normal (not workers) capped brood. It is a mystery! Anyway, now it is respectful 6-bar nuc in full-size box and growing! Unfortunately, I have no pictures of their beginning because I did inspections very quickly to protect them from cold. First pic is 2-3 months ago, second one - today.
 

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#214 ·
Re: Inspection Jan 28 2014

Teal
Imagine you are tasting your own honey! This is the best part of beekeeping - untouched, fresh, totally organic (hopefully) honey from your bees! Everybody, who tried our honey - do not buy honey in the store anymore. Pure, natural wax candles as a Christmas gift were great too! Smells - fantastic! plus as a byproduct - the mead :) plus propolis for medicinal use ....
 
#222 ·
Re: Inspection Jan 28 2014

I'm getting my first package of bees next month and i'm planning to start out with foundationless frames have already got the hives and frames.just hope that my frames turn out as nice as yours.
Allan
I think, starting bee package foundationless may be a challenge. I would use wax foundation at least at the beginning and than add foundationless one-by-one between already drawn frames. This way you will teach bees how to make a straight comb on foundationless frames. If you want to be a purist and start completely foundationless, than you really need to keep eye on girls and correct each comb quite often. I have a nuc, where bees start comb without any guide. I corrected it once or twice with the knife - they have completed two deeps now and busy making a super - all without a single foundation! I observed that bees somehow learned how to make straight comb on foundationless - with time, they do it better and better! Moreover, it sounded completely crazy, but, it seems to me that they do teach neighbors!

I wish you the best with your new bees!
 
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