Cost?

 

The only advantage I would see is printing out fully drawn comb with beeswax. Printing foundation would be cost prohibitive.

 

It would be tricky to do, pure beeswax would be a poor media to use to print. It would be very difficult to keep it from remelting as you are printing the next layer.

 

Aparently it just needs a different extruder http://www.3ders.org/articles/20140103-3d-printed-beeswax-project.html

 

Will printing with wax is impractical, using a 3D printer to make the mold should be possible. The advantage would be that one could form different size celling the same sheet. This would be much closer to what is seen in nature and with foundationless frames. My understanding is the bees make larger cells at the top and upper corners like around 6+mm then in the center make 5.4mm cells and the lower portion of the frame cells are 4.9mm.
I would like to hear from anyone that has more information on cell sizes and patterns.

 

My friend at work has a couple, I'm going to talk to him tomorrow. He has made custom extruder heads to improve printing. Large items I can see, I'm just not sure about the fine details for honeycomb depending on how thick the cell walls need to be.

 

The nice thing about wax is ya only got to get it close, they will clean it up and re work it beautifully

 

The bees are my 3-D printers. Put a plastic foundation in with a half decent wax coating and the next day it's pretty well mostly drawn. Presto.

The idea of printing fully drawn comb is very interesting to me, however, neat idea. I just think the bees probably do it significantly more efficiently when it gets down to brass tacks.

 

Very true, but how nice would it be to use all you comb to make late splits for spring nuc sales and then spend all winter in yer home office printing new comb for swarm management and honey collection?

 

Here is an interesting article on some scientists from New Zealand, they have developed software to mimic the design of honeycomb. They are working on developing a printer to use beeswax.
https://3dprint.com/113066/3d-printed-honeycomb/

Here is another article where they tried to develop a fluid extruder for using beeswax, is does a good job of documenting the temperature issues they face.

https://hackaday.io/project/1169-fluid-extruder-for-3d-printer

 

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Neat discussion, thank you