Pics of my First Foundationless Honey

[alfred]

Just pulled this out of one of my supers the other day! I love it!

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=23237&id=1634864459&l=01d9253bc6

Alfred

[Kathyp]

very nice!!  congratulations  :-D

[GaryMinckler]

Looks real good!  I'm hoping to get some from a TBH.

[Shawn]

Wow! I wish I could get honey from my bees.

[mjb1]

Awesome looking frame hope I can get some next year

[Hethen57]

Very nice Alfred....my bees kind of made a mess of my foundationless experiment on one of my hives.

[NasalSponge]

Yummy! :-D

[asprince]

Excellent, that is what it is all about.


Steve

[John Schwartz]

Good work :)

[poka-bee]

Beautiful, that's what we all want to see! :-D
Jody

[bugleman]

I will second that YUM!

[bee-nuts]

Fantastic!!

It does not appear that you used any wire.  Yet they still have comb drawn to bottom bar.  Were they all like that?

Im curious because I want to try it next year and thought you needed to use wire to give it strength for extracting because they would not attach it to bottom bar.

[alfred]

All of them that I have looked at so far are built all the way to the bottom. Initially they are softer but they seem to firm up after a bit. I don't have an extractor, or rather I am still working on a home made one so I don't know how they would do in the extractor.
My understanding from others who have done it though is that they do quite well.

I think that the main reason that wire is used in foundation is to support it before the bees make the comb and not so much for support for after it is built. I'm not sure on this because the only other type of frame that I use is one peice pf120's. I think that if you tried to use wire that they would simply build around it and you would have a mess.

There were some frames where they were not building totally centered on the bar and I gently pushed the comb over and switched frames around to encourage straighter comb. This problem seems to be eliminated if you intersperse the empty foundationless frames every other one with fully drawn frames. Kind of guides them. So now when I add a super of empty frames I take half of the full box bellow and put them in the new box and half of the new frames in the previously full box. Seems to work real well.

Alfred

[Bee J]

Your bees have done magnificent work, Alfred!   I want to try to go foundationless & I like the idea of mixing the frames up like you've done....did you have any "guide" on your foundationless frames?   Tks and congrats!

[alfred]

I used wedge top frames and turned the wedge peice on edge and stapled it in that way. At first I was using a 1 inch peice of foundation as a starter strip. Then I read here somewhere about using paint stirs, then also read here about simply turning the wedge on edge and that seemed the easiest.  Initially I simply interspersed them with the already drawn pf120's. It works great so far for me.

I am beginning to wonder why anyone uses anything else! Why was wax foundation even invented? What a pain... Maybe it was to try to control cell size?

I like the method so much that I just bought a batch of 500 frames from Western .38 each, cheap cheap. All with solid bottom bars so I am commited. Definitly cheaper than the pf120's I have. And easier than using foundation.

I do have to say again that all of the ideas I got from folks here thanks for all of the help!
Alfred

[Damonh]

Verry nice.
Sent you a note on facebook.
Damon

[BruinnieBear]

Makes my mouth water for that fresh, comb honey!  :-D  I'll have to ask the ladies to build some next year, instead of spinning it all.

BB