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Thread: Strip foundation brood frame with bamboo

  1. #11

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    So the curve's in the wedge, not the wax - that's good! Waxy curves have such a tendency to amplify, that's which was bothering me.
    I've heard about using the wedge, but it seems affa wide to me - two choices of corner for the bees to start building from them, and one is quite a distance from the centre of the frame, which seems like asking for trouble. I think I may have tried one like that this year, but if so I've forgotten where I put it, and haven't noticed the outcome yet. Spring was a bit of a scramble, work & life interfering with beekeeping...
    I've started trying just leaving the wedge out altogether, and instead shaving the deep side of the top bar to a triangular cross-section, leaving a sharp pointed edge along the middle of the frame. Turns out to be quite quick to do with a big, sharp knife (usually when desperately trying to get out to the apiary before the next rain shower), and the few I've looked at so far seem quite promising. Makes the frames utterly useless for normal use afterwards, but it cuts down the number of bits & the number of operations, including when reusing the frame, which is very much what I need!
    It'd be nice to hear more about how you get on with those reinforcements, though. Could help a lot with keeping things straight, & simple.

  2. #12
    Senior Member Mellifera Crofter's Avatar
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    I found an alternative to bamboo skewers: bamboo plant sticks (from eBay) which are longer than the bamboo skewers and means I can run them horizontally, and are much easier to make than the frames with vertical skewers.

    The bees still need to give their verdict. I wanted to link to the Apiarist's really good article on foundationless frames, and its follow-up, but there's a server error (Fatshark?), so I'm linking to his Twitter feed.

    IMG_20170703_105636.jpg
    Last edited by fatshark; 06-07-2017 at 01:37 PM. Reason: Hamsters told to pedal faster ... server now up and running

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