Hey gang -- having fun getting bees to take to plastic frames. I'm thinking of swapping out half with wood frames (to save some dough) and alternate wood and plastic frames in my honey supes. Good idear?
If you have some wax on the plastic they will be ok.
If you go half and half they may take the wood frames and skip the plastic.
I have had it happen. :)doak
why stop at half I would go all in on the wood and wax frames and save even more dough. According to the American bee federation 9 out of 10 bees surveyed preferred wood over plastic :-D
I am having good experiences with plastic in the hive bodies of packages with natural cell in the honey boxes. On my small cell nucs, I put in wood with starter strips, and they draw them out just fine. When they are ready, I'll add wood frames with wax starter strips.
In my 15 or so hives, I have about 20 plastic frames (HSC). If I was not wasting resources, I would pull all of them today and sell them to someone who likes them because I sure don't.
I have settled on wood frames and pierco wax coated foundation. When I get enough wax, I will probably start buying unwaxed and wax them myself.
Thanks for the notes/input, all!
Blessings,
John Schwartz
Quote from: lotsobees on June 22, 2009, 11:02:19 PM
Hey gang -- having fun getting bees to take to plastic frames. I'm thinking of swapping out half with wood frames (to save some dough) and alternate wood and plastic frames in my honey supes. Good idear?
No
I've had pretty good luck with PF120s mixing them with foundationless. But I would NOT put them every other frame. I'd put the foundationless together and the plastic together. Otherwise they will draw the foundationless fat and ignore the plastic.
Michael. I have used a PF-120 in the center as a ladder in a box of foundationless and had good luck. The bees have seemed to draw the plastic first and then the foundationless. (but only in this set up with the one plastic as a ladder). IS this consistent with your experience?
Quote from: riverrat on June 23, 2009, 12:15:23 AM
why stop at half I would go all in on the wood and wax frames and save even more dough.
Hmm...I save the most dough going all plastic frames/foundation.
You can swap them out...once they are all drawn. And to save even more go 8 or 9 frames in the super.
When it's the ladder, yes. I think it's the way up, so they hang on it. If I put more in, they tend to draw the foundationless first.
I noticed something quite interesting today during a hive inspection. I have some foundationless mixed in with PF-100. The bees had drawn the foundationless completely and had it filled with uncured honey. (this was a bot odd as it was in the middle of the second deep). They had drawn the foundationless all the way to the pf-100 but did not attach. This resulted in a frame and a half. I will likely harvest this as soon as it is capped in that it decreases the cell number by taking half of the pf-100 out of production.
I slipped one of those black plastic boards in my hive last spring. I placed one wax foundation sheet on each side, melted it onto the black plastic using the heat from the sun, rubbed it all over to try to make the cells on the wax match the slightly smaller ones on the black plastic. I guess this gives twice as much wax to a frame than just a wax sheet.
Anyways, they drew and filled it very quickly, no probs at all. This frame was easier to extract as the solid plastic backing made it impossible for the wax to break through the other side,
This spring, I plan to go 50/50 with wax sheet and waxed plastic. I might even just coat the plastic with melted wax and a brush for half the frames to compare to the melted on method.