Worldwide Beekeeping
Beekeeping => General Beekeeping => Topic started by: Yankee11 on July 14, 2014, 03:14:56 pm
-
Has anyone ever installed medium plastic foundation into a deep frame.
I am thinking of this to maybe be able to be able to harvest swarm cells if built on bottom half of the frame. I wonder if this would work.
If you used the notching system, you could notch eggs below the plastic and split, then harvest the extra queen cells.
Thoughts?
-
No, I haven't tried it but I'm sure it would work. Lauri Miller has done considerable experimentation with half sheets of rite cell in deep frames. Hers go all the way down in the center. The bees draw worker comb up the center and drone comb on the sides.
Oddly enough when hers is drawn out they look just exactly like my foundationless frames.
-
Out of necessity, I had to place two medium frames in a deep hive in the brood box. The frames were wood with rite cell foundation. The bees made brood on the rite cell and built foundation less comb on the bottom of the frame. It worked well in the brood box.
-
What you are proposing will take multiple frames. You will probably find that the first two or three frames that you do in this fashion will be drawn entirely with drone comb. Once they have enough drone comb they will draw the rest worker size.
I played around with OTS notching this spring. If you want to have Q cells to move to other hives, then you can just notch spots on multiple frames. I had about 50% acceptance with the notches. So if I notched 4 spots on one frame I'd usually end up with two nice queen cells. Since there are usually only three frames or so in a hive with freshly hatched larvae, so this is not the ideal method for raising large numbers of queens.
-
As stated... if what they draw is NOT drone comb It has a chance. Another issue would be if they attached the comb in a few places to the frame below it. Tearing it off could affect the queen cells, so notch them as high as possible and still allow room to cut them free.