Truly, Madly, Completely Foundationless Frames

As most of you know, I don't use foundation.  I have gone through quite an evolution of approaches to reach what I am doing this year.

In the very beginning I used thin surplus wax foundation because I didn't think plastic was natural and didn't want it in my hives.  Then I started following Michael Bush and cut wax strips.  I waxed them into the grooves in the frames to give the bees a starting point.  Then the next year I decided after listening to Jennifer Berry that we were all better off with NO commercial wax with its chemical composition of fluvalinate and coumaphos.  So then I started using craft sticks glued into the groove.

In December on Christmas Day I slipped on ice while hiking in N Georgia.  I didn't know it then, but I tore my posterior tibia ligament and I have been slowly, s...l....o.....w......l......y healing since then.  I still am wearing a wrap on my ankle and tennis shoes every single day.  When bee season started, standing for a long time meant a terrible burning sensation around my ankle bone.

So I have been doing lazy beekeeping.  When my frames have old comb in them that needs replacing, I remove the old comb.  But I haven't been waxing or gluing ANytHing in and the bees are making beautiful comb without my giving them any starting place.

The photos are blurry - I used my iPhone and it doesn't accommodate my shaky hands.

Old comb:

Tear out old comb (really blurry, but it falls into a box of removed comb):

In a stewpot of boiling water, immerse the frame for 30 seconds.  Obviously the whole frame won't fit into the stew pot so I put in one half and then the other.

It isn't in the water long enough to even think about warping and all the wax melts off.  Meanwhile because I do four boxes worth of frames in one stew pot, the water in the pot is laced with melted wax so the frame gets slightly coated with melted wax.  This alone may stimulate the bees to build comb.

I use a skewer or a hive tool or whatever I have to slide along the groove and effectively mess up the patterns for any crooked comb left by the bees.  In the photo below, the right side of the frame has been submerged already and the left side still has old comb on it.  

The water is boiling hot so it quickly evaporates and the frames are ready in seconds to be put back in the hive box.  

With nothing but their bare nakedness, I put the frames onto a hive and the bees build happily.  I do checkerboard as in the post just before this, and that brings the bees into the box, but obviously they don't need my time or craft sticks to know where to start to build their comb.

I am not finding that crooked comb happens often.  When it does, it's in a hive where there has been a tendency to build crooked comb and many beekeepers suggest that that tendency is a genetic anomaly - not great genetics for comb-building = crooked comb.  

And if you don't correct it, the bees continuously build crooked comb to parallel the mess they made at the beginning.  But mostly the bees build straight beautiful comb from the bare top bar and appear to be happy campers about it.

How to build a Frame

At the end of January I posted some questions that most new beekeepers wish to have answered (or at least I did). Here are the questions:

1. How hard is it to put together a hive box?
2. What do you use to light a smoker?
3. How do you put the bees in the hive and what are the scary parts?
4. How do you deal with your neighbors?
5. What is it like to be stung the first time?
6. How much is the initial investment and do you have to have an extractor?
7. Will you have enough wax the first year to make candles?
8. What's the purpose of a hive inspection and how hard is it to do one?
9. What are the most confusing parts of the first year of beekeeping?

I answered the first one: "How hard is it to put together a hive box?" here.
A missing question from the above list is how to build frames for your hives. The easiest way to build frames is to use a "jig" to build a lot of frames at once, but in order to use the jig, you have to understand how just one frame is built - so here goes:


Basically you glue the frames together and then nail them together.


If you are using foundation, on some frames you nail in the foundation with the wedge. On others you wax in the foundation into the groove of the frame using the wax tube fastener. I don't usually use foundation, but rather give the bees starter strips which are waxed into the frames just like full sheets of foundation. I wax the starter strips into both groove and wedge frames.


I find building frames to be a bit boring so instead of working on my downstairs workbench, I usually build my frames in front of the TV while I watch a movie.

The frames I built in this post came from Walter T. Kelley Company. His frames have two notches on the bottom of the end bar, but the principle of frame building is the same whether there are two notches on the bottom of the end bar or just one.

I made one of my own movies about building frames posted below: