Hello everyone,
We made some windows in our latest hive. This is very rewarding as it makes it possible to take a look into your hive every day, without opening the hive.
here’s the short video about that:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfCAEdrnMEs
Enjoy!
Great! Even better without foundation blocking your view.
Found something like that on ebay the other day. Consider buying it for next season or split…
Ah, yes, without foundation it would be even better to see what is going on inside the hive. However, I understand it takes quite a bit of resources for the bees to produce wax, which is why we decided to help them out a bit by adding the wax foundation.
You are right, they don’t. But, as I understand it, it takes some 4kg of honey to produce 1kg of wax, so that is why decided to provide them with a bit of a headstart.
However, I would like to try out using foundation-less frames at some point. Should be very interesting to see how they built from scratch.
This is how. That’s a frame without anyting (but wire). They built worker cells on one half and drone cells on the other. I think it’ absolutely gorgeous!
And this is all worker comb. The frame was equipped with a starter strip, just wide enough to be fixed to the first wire (about 3cm). The do use the wire to enforce their comb.
I experimented with foundation-less frames in the brood-box, this year (just using a wax starter-strip). It worked out rather fine. Except that they don’t seem to like the metal guide wires all that much. Mine are vertically oriented in the frame and they pretty much tried to avoid building too much on them.
Maybe I should have waxed the wires first? From the pictures, it seems that you don’t have that experience of them not liking the wires (of course yours are oriented horizontally, but I don’t see how that should make a difference, really).
