Foundationless Frames

Doris' photos made me think that maybe it was worth a thread on this as I've also started to go down the route of not using foundation anymore for a number of reasons.

This year I started off with the super frames simply because I was buying new ones and it seemed a good place to start.

Having heard all sorts of nightmare stories about disintegrating combs in extractors and how drone comb isn't as attractive when packaged as cut comb I was a little apprehensive, but overall I'm quite pleased with how it's gone.

In the end I didn't do cut comb at all this year so the attractiveness of drone cells over worker cells when it comes to that side of things hasn't been a factor but I've also not had a problem putting unwired comb through the extractor. I did disintegrate a particularly fat wired frame on the first attempt using the extractor but having been more careful since I've not found them a problem as long as you start off slow to get the initial weight of honey out of the frames.

Next year I'm intending to go foundationless on the brood frames which, with 14x12s, might be a little more interesting. I'm not sure whether to try and brace them in the middle with some bottom bars or just leave them to it and learn to be careful handling the frames.

Why consider going foundationless to begin with? At a risk of sound all brown rice and sandals, there's a few things that have started to sway me in that direction:

1) Bees like drones. They must do or they wouldn't fill every spare gap in the hive with drone comb. I could just slap a couple of sheets of drone cell foundation in for sure but:

2) I'm interested to see what they do when they're left to their own devices. Doris' photo "quiz" was very interesting and I'm fascinated to see what they get up in my own colonies.

3) A couple of studies that I read recently about what's actually in beeswax/comb other than the wax itself. I don't want to make crap analogies and I've no idea as a new beekeeper (and still pretty ignorant one at that) what constitutes "bad" levels of various things, but when I do try and dose my bees with as little stuff as possible it seems a little silly to me to then give them foundation comprising of at least some levels of everyone else's detritus.

4) I'm lazy. sticking an inch square of wax to the middle of a frame is much quicker, easier and cheaper than a sheet of foundation. It's also why I've not really mentioned using wire or fishing line to reinforce the comb area. My feeling this year is that for my bees 14x12s are a little large so I was starting to consider just bracing the middle of the frame with a bottom bar or two cut to size and pinned in place which should also make it easier to just trim out half a frame if that's all that could do with removal either because it's dirty/old or that it's largely drone cells and could be removed as part of varroa IPM.