[Ryan Williamson]

I forgot to put a frame back in a hive

The bees did a nice job filling the space which gave me a good surprise when I opened up the lid.







I pressed the comb into a wired foundationless frame with temporary rubber bands to hold it and the bees fixed it in 24 hours so I could not tell any difference

 

[sqkcrk]

Neat.

 

[WBVC]

Do most folks wire foundation less frames or just live totally open?

 

[drlonzo]

I wire mine. Makes it easier to flip the frames around without having to worry when the comb is new and not attached at the sides very well. Bees do a great job with the frame wire and ignore it and keep on making the comb.

 

[biggraham610]

Do most folks wire foundation less frames or just live totally open?

Ive heard of both, I dont, but its my first year trying foundationless. Personal preference from what I gather. Once they tie to the sides and bottom mine are plenty sturdy. G

 

[JakeDatc]

I'm not wiring mine. Am going to do Crush/strain so i don't need wires. just keeping the combs vertical is a good skill to have and it's just about paying attention.

Ryan how many days did it take them to do that before you looked in again?

 

[JWChesnut]

Some parallax in the image, but the bulk of the cells appear to be very evenly drawn at 5.4 mm
10 cell == 105 pix* 232 mm / 449 pix

 

[Ryan Williamson]

This hive is at an outyard that is an hour away so I rarely make it there. This was an unusually close visit 10 days apart. It was a hive that threw a swarm and I robbed a number of frames with queen cells to make lemonade out of lemons. In that rushed process making up 4-5 nucs from the hive I forgot to replace a frame. So the comb is around a week old in this photo but is still white as the queen had just mated and laying her first eggs when I returned to find my mistake.

JWChesnut.... I would not be at all surprised if the cell size is larger. I have run thousands of foundationless frames and can't say that I see the small cells that others see.

 

[Ryan Williamson]

I do wire all of frames as fresh comb with honey in it is rather unstable. I sell a number of nucs and don't ever want to learn of combs collapsing on customers. I wire all of my mediums and shallows as well as I have found that it nearly eliminate blowouts in the radial extractor with fresh comb. I extracted 800lbs of honey last week and did not have a single blowout. I thought that was neat as nearly all of the frames were foundationless mediums and shallows and over half of them had wax that was less than two months old. Beautiful white wax sure is soft.