Can I get a small cell with that?



The girls building on a foundationless frame. They make
short work of seamlessly connecting those lobes.



In my last post I hinted at something that is widely becoming important in the natural beekeeping movement: small cells. First, a definition: foundation is a plastic or wax sheet that is imprinted with hexagon patterns and inserted in the frame. The idea is to quicken the bees' ability to produce honey comb (and, therefore, honey) and to make the frames more robust for extraction. While there is some argument about the first, the second defiintely applies. Most beekeepers use a centrifugal extraction process, spinning the honey out of comb. Without the foundation, newer comb can break and collapse, making a mess of an already kinda messy process.





Filled foudationless frame from early last year. The wax would
not be as translucent as this if you looked at it this year. New
wax is a beautiful creamy white to light gold color, but it
darkens as it ages. Fortunately, it also hardens as it ages.



When beekeepers first started putting in foundation for the bees to work on, they also realized that they could manipulate the size of the cells. And the American ideal is bigger is better, so they made the cells artificially large to grow bigger bees (bigger bees = more honey, right?). But there are problems with making something do what it wasn't intended to do.



First, bigger cells attract varroa mites. One physical control for varroa is inserting a drone frame or two into a hive. Varroa love drone cells for the length of time the drone takes to develop (drones develop in about 24 days as compared to 21 for workers and 16-18 for queens--click here for a Wikipedia article on bee development). So the mites will gravitate toward drone-sized cells and the beekeeper can capitalize on this by inserting a frame with foundation sized for drones. After the drone cells are capped so they can pupate, the frame is removes and its contents destroyed, thereby eliminating a generation of mites and reducing an infestation (this method doesn't sit well with me or John as raising a whole frame of brood for the purpose of killing them seems wasteful, counterproductive and unecessarily cruel).

But mites aren't smart enough to to know a large cell is going to be a drone cell, they just gravitate toward them. Hence, the large cell frames used to get bigger bees in general attract varroa mites and most breeds of bees can't detect infested cells. So beekeepers turned to miticides to deal with the varroa, and dealt a blow to their bees in the process (see my post , "A Call to Organic Beekeeping" for a discussion on this and more).

Infested pupa being removed from the hive.
See more at Growing Small Farms.

Second, bees build things differently in the wild. Generally speaking, they build larger cells toward the top of a comb and smaller toward the bottom. Part of this stems from the seasonal use of the comb - the generation that will overwinter is layed in the smaller cells - and part is the need for drone cells, but some of it is just simply a mystery. The thing to remember: bees do not design their hives based on man-made geometry or cookie cutter patterns. An thing of note when it comes to varroa, several breeds of bees, inlcuding Russian and Minnesota Hygenics, can somehow tell when mites are present in a brood cell and will remove the infected pupae. These breeds tend to practice behaviors that help them overcome more than jsut varroa. Hygenic habits such as grooming and evicting sick bees keep the hive healthier overall and more resistant to the problems plaguing the industry.

Third, and the most important from a commercial aspect, many beekeepers have discovered that bees build their comb without foundation faster than they do with. John and I discovered this with our hives last year. Our bees loved building their own comb and could finish off a deep frame in just over a week. For some reason, some hives show reluctance to build on foundationed frames at all.

Last (or at least the last thing I'll bring up here), wax absorbs pesticide residue readily, thus guaranteeing long term exposure to the bees. This is part of the reason we want to swap out the old frames that came in the nucleus hives last year. Likewise, a possibility exists that the wax can harbor diseases. A healthy hive will move when it deems necessary. And, while a hive can remain in the same place for years and years, this is the exception to the rule.

More than a bit ironic to me, the industry has seen the marketing potential for small cells and created foundation to meet the need. I wonder if that will just lead to some other problem sometime down the road. In the meantime, John and I will stick with foundationless and see how the results pan out.

Posted by Bob Nelson