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Laurence Edwards checks his plastic frames two weeks in. The bees have drawn out about 80% of the wax-coated frames and capped some honey, while the uncoated frame barely developed. He'll feed the colony to push comb building before winter.
Laurence Edwards checks his plastic frames two weeks in. The bees have drawn out about 80% of the wax-coated frames and capped some honey, while the uncoated frame barely developed. He'll feed the colony to push comb building before winter.
It's been 2 weeks since I did my previous video on plastic frames and gave you a little bit of an update. I was maybe disappointed that the bees hadn't drawn them out as much, and I'm just gonna keep on going with this, 2-weekly intervals, just to show you how well the bees are progressing, if they're drawing it out, if they're putting eggs, larva, brood, or if they're just using it to store honey. I'll get my bee suit on, let's go and take a look at my plastic frames and give you an update. So before I open them up, just wanna say it may be a little bit unfair, this comparison here. I'm doing this test when there isn't really much of a flow on. It's kind of middle of August now, coming towards the back end of August. Everything's dying down, the flowers are going over, everything's dry. So maybe a little bit of an unfair test to see how well the bees are drawing these out. We'll definitely get a good reflection of that kind of post-winter as the bees come through and as they build up into the spring. Let's get inside though, see what the bees have done. Okay, so the bees have actually made quite a nice little bit of progress on this. They've gone a little bit further than last time. You can definitely see that they're doing well in terms of storing the honey in there, capping that honey over as well. Really happy with that. A couple of nice frames there. Still got the slight issue that they're not taking it right up into the corner, but I wouldn't read too much into that because as I said, we've not got the flow going on at the moment, which means that the bees are going to be a little bit reluctant to actually draw out these combs and to get them right down into the corner. We'll keep on going with it though. We'll see how the bees are getting on. I'll do this every couple of weeks. What I'm going to do with this colony here is I'm just going to give them a little bit of a feed, see if we can stimulate them to draw out that comb. I'd like to see if we can get them drawn out before winter. So although there's not a huge amount of progress, definitely a step forward from last time. They've expanded down that drawn area. They're capping over some of the honey. Let's get inside quick though and have a look at that frame that had no wax coating on it, see if the bees have made any progress. So still not drawing that one out. They did that tiny little bit. I suspect we had a bit of a flow at that point and they started drawing it out, but they have all but given up on that. Not to worry though, these frames do come wax coated. I'm doing a little bit of an experiment here to see what would happen if they weren't wax coated. They seem to have drawn it out quite well, They've definitely stopped and they're not interested in that anymore. Final look at this frame over here. This is one of the really good frames. Not too much capped over, but really taking it down. Good progress, but a little bit slow. So I'm quite happy with that frame there. That's probably about 80% drawn out now. So I'm quite happy with this frame there, about 80% drawn out. I'm gonna give them a feed, see if that helps them, and we'll come back in 2 weeks.
