i've been wrestling with 6 frames of plastic foundation for 2 years now - today while making the first inspection of the season (yippie!) i decided to just remove them and see if i can re-wax them. i stripped off what little comb there was, now i'm left with a bit of a mess - some sections with a nice covering of wax, others just bare plastic. what is the best way to re-wax this foundation? is there a method to clean it so i can get a nice coating down over the entire foundation sheet? i have the double boiler and brush standing by :-D
Last year in early spring. I took a paint brush and some honey that I wanted to feed back any way. painted the frames with honey. The bees moved up and drawned them out pretty Quick
I have read that one can also spay the plastic with heavy sugar syrup or spread bees wax over them. Anything to get the bees to start working on the frame and primes it with a more appealing sent. I use Plasticell and sometime my bees will not draw out a frame of two. Syrup has worked before but this year I'll try spreading wax instead.
I don't use the platic stuff any more, but it worked fine. I know a beek who put wax on a hot plate and uses a small paint roller to coat the plastic, he gets them pretty thick with wax and has great results.
With foundation being so inexpensive, for what the outcome is, why would anyone use that plastic stuff. I want my bees to have better than that plastic stuff, for that matter they deserve better. A starter strip is better than that stuff in my opinion. I have found that a hive can build just as fast without foundation as they can with foundation. Give or take a day or so. Just my unobiased opinion though.
I use a crock pot and a black foam paint brush. They are around $3 for 6 of them. The 3 inch one does about half of a medium frame at a time. The bees draw it out much faster with a good coating on the plastic.
Fuzzybeekeeper
Can some one tell me more about painting the plastic foudation with honey please? I use full depth plastic foundation and currently heat wax and paint it on with a brush. I watched a bloke in Marong use a paint roller to apply hot wax prior to pusing the foundation sheets into the frames.
i'll try the honey trick - i have some from last year....
Even though my frames came "coated" with wax, I melted some and simply used a paint brush to apply to the frames. A thin coat was all I did. You can do about 10 frames in around 5 minutes. Very easy to do. The bees drew these out with no issues.
wait for nectar flow. When there drawing wax.