As I previously explained the bee hive is effectively split into two areas:
The area where they live
The area where they work
Both of these areas contain frames for the bees to build on and are show in the image below:
As you can see, the bottom frame is much larger than the top frame; This is because the bottom frame is taken from the base of the hive which is where the bees effectively live.
The top frame is a lot smaller and is taken from the honey layer.
A couple of things to note before moving on:
1. The wax is like paper with a pattern already embossed onto it. This pattern gives the bees a hexagon base from which to start and to use as a template. If I left the frame empty or put flat wax in they would still build hexagons but the proportions might vary from cell to cell. So in this way I am ensuring (or trying to ensure) consistency across the frame and across the hive (this is an important point when we consider management and processing).
2. The frame size is specific to the type of bee hive that I use, so if you're up in the Swiss German part of the country or in England your frames would be a different size (although the construction would be identical aside from that).
You might be wondering why I would recycle something that is made from wax and is continually built upon by an army of thousands?
Simply put it's because of consistency during the processing steps and also for quality.
Take a look at the picture below:
This is a close up shot of a frame from last summer, note that the wax is a nice colour but it is not flat - you can clearly see an undulating surface.
If I put this frame back in the hive in spring it will give me an advantage in efficiency, ie. the bees will not have to build the wax and can just fill it - but they will build a bit more on top of it.
When I take the frame out the current undulations in the structure will be further exagerated - this means that it will take me a lot more time to prepare the frame in order to extract the honey.
The wax will still be a nice colour though.
If I now put the frame back in for a third time the structures built by the bees will have no consistency (it's like looking at waves in the sea) and the wax will change colour (darker) thus indicating that it's getting a bit grubby.
This colouration is primarily on the surface but to my way of thinking why would I willingly let the hive get grubby? - It wont do the bees any harm but they are happier in a clean environment, so for the sake of spending a few minutes melting the wax and a couple of Francs and putting a fresh one on it seems a shame.
The house frames however are a slightly different story.
These frames see a lot more wear, they're not swapped out every couple of months three times a year but rather left for years (on a rotation system).
In the house frames the new bees will be layed, incubated and emerge, the number of bees walking all over the surfaces are massively increased (in comparrison to the honey layer frames) and so with the increased foot flow comes the increase in discolouration - The wood of the frame also gets discoloured.
Just as with us a clean environment is a healthy environment, so when a frame looks really quite grubby I always swap it out (when there's no more eggs left on it).
The best time to do this is early in the year, the honey will have been stripped from it, the queen wont have started laying lots of eggs yet and so it's easy enough to take an old one out and put a fresh one in (they'll then build on it).
So how do I do it?
Look at the image below, it shows a new frame with wire:
The wire is there to offer support to the wax structure.
I now take a fresh sheet of wax:
I then place the wax on the empty frame (after ensuring that the wax is at roughly 25 degrees c).
At this point I connect the power supply as shown below:
When I touch the two connectors from the power supply onto the opposite sides of the frame they make a complete circuit and this causes the wire in the frame to heat up.
The wax then melts on to the wires - and if I leave it connected for more than about 5 seconds it cuts the wax into nice strips and they sit on the table.
The wires should be about half way through the wax in order to provide the desired support (more support = more honey storage without collapse).
And that's it, when i'm done I have frames that look like the picture at the top of the page.
this is just another bee keepers winter activity - winter is used to get everything ready for the next year.
The wax isn't wasted either, I can either take it to my supplier and trade it against new wax or make candles/soaps/lip balms etc (I made some last year as an experiment) - but obviously before anything happens to the wax it gets melted and filtered.
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