Frame starter strips

After much deliberation about what type of hive we've decided to stick with the Langstroth hive. Our plans for Top Bar Hives fell through, mostly because of weather. TBH's don't do that well in really cold weather because the bees have a hard time moving horizontally though the hive for food rather than vertically. That might not make sense but take my word for it. Plus with a box of bee's costing $80 in our area, it seemed a risky leap to take concerning those lovely buzzers. So our original goal was to use a Langstroth (typical hive) but no frame foundation. The foundation for the frames is usually made of plastic and is a set size usually worker bee (girl) size. No drone (boy) size. Which can freak out the hive and some have theorized that it adds to CCD (bad bee disease in the news lately).

I follow a blog called Backwards Beekeepers, Kirk demos how we can help them to draw there own comb with out any sort of foundation as a guide. This gives the bee's a --> build here <-- sign.

Frame with pre built foundation. Picture from here.

Now this is what we are doing. I've melted bee's wax from our local no chemicals group. Then I wetted a 16" piece of lumber ( the water makes the melted bee's wax not stick to the wood). I painted a thin layer of wax onto the board then peeled it off the wood and stuck it into the hive frame.

I wedge the thin wax strip into the top groove of the frame like so, then paint with melted wax in the groove to give the wax strip some extra grip so it won't fall out.

I did that with all 40 frames for our 4 hive body's This is the bee's build here sign and will "help" them build in a straight line. Because sometimes they don't like to build straight.... silly girls!

Our bee keeping class went really well, I forgot to update about that because we were doing our flooring project at the same time. Jake and I passed our beekeeping class and are now official State of Washington Apprentice Beekeepers!! Our 2 boxes of girls arrive on April 17, just a little over 2 weeks a way. Jake my engineer has to build the hive stands and we have to cap off a few sprinkler heads in the area we are putting them. Then Bee's!