My bees HATE platic frames and foundation!

efaure said:

The frames that I washed with hot water and removed everything off of, they will not touch. Any suggestions?:scratch:

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Those frames likely came wax coated, which you washed off with the hot water. Plastic without a wax coating isn't likely to get much attention from the bees. With the wax coating, they work it just fine. I got tired of reading all the various somewhat charged opinions on frames, foundation, etc. My goal, minimize the work for me, and the way to do that is not bother with fiddly bits assembling frames, just take plastic out of the box and put it in the colony. So I decided to ask my bees if they have a strong preference. I took a 'fresh out of the box' Mann Lake PF-100 frame, and fixed it up like this:-



That frame went into a rather strong colony, in the brood nest. After two days, I popped it out to see what it looked like, and it looked like this:-



The angle of the light makes it tough to see, but, on the foundation side, they have started comb on well over 50% of the surface. A couple days later, I did a cut down split on that colony because they were starting to show signs of backfilling, and I was leaving town for a week, couldn't keep a close eye on them. After we got back, I checked the frame again, it had been in the colony for two weeks, and it looked like this:-



My conclusion, not much if any difference in how much comb gets drawn when I give the bees a choice, work the plastic foundation, or the foundationless section. There is a flow running, and they want comb. I think the best thing to come out of this experiment, going to have a nice chunk of fresh new comb, full of honey, which wont end up in the extractor, it'll end up being cut comb honey. Should be a new queen laying in that colony this week, so that frame is going above an excluder to make sure no brood ends up in the comb I'm going to use for comb honey pieces. But my bees have told me very clearly, plastic foundation that smells like wax when I put it in the hive, will get drawn just as fast as foundationless, provided there is a flow running.

In another experiment I did, along the same lines, I have a box of older PF-500 frames that have been in the box for a couple years, and lost the fresh wax smell, they come out of the box smelling like plastic. I took a deep super, put 3 of those in the center, then on one side I put 3 more, but painted with wax which I melted in the crok pot. Then on the other side, I filled the rest of the box with fresh new PF-100 frames, right out of the box, that do have the sweet wax smell when they come out of the box. The older plastic smelling frames have not been touched, the waxed PF-500 frames are fully drawn, as are the PF-100 frames.

After all of my experiments this summer, I've more or less confirmed a lot of what were my suspicions. To get plastic frames drawn they need to NOT smell like plastic, and there needs to be a flow running. I've got a number of boxes of frames well under way now, and my experiments have confirmed that I really dont need to do a lot of extra work to assemble fiddly little pieces making wood frames, then wiring and putting in foundation. Plastic frames are just fine, provided conditions are good. My other suspicion is, when conditions are not good for getting frames drawn, it wont matter what kind I put in the colony, none will get drawn. I dont think I'm going to spend any time/effort to prove that one.