Frame Spacing Tip: Draw Perfect Comb in Your Super (Every Time)

I've got a tip for you that is gonna save you hours and hours of time at the end of the season when it comes to extracting your honey. You do not wanna miss this one. So when it comes to spacing the frames in the beehive, in the brood box, I always recommend going for a self-spacing frame and making sure that the sidebars are touching each other. That will give you the correct brood space to make sure that you can manage your bees properly in the brood nest. But upstairs in the supers, you can do things slightly differently. And the way you set it up at the beginning of the year is going to dictate how easily you can get at that honey and how easy your life is going to be going forward. So let's take a look at this first super here. This has got standard SM4 self-spacing frames. These are the frames that you're going to see downstairs in the brood box. And when you're managing the bees in the brood box with self-spacing frames like this, you don't want them all over the place like that. They're designed to be pushed up against each other like that to give you the correct frame spacing. Now what a lot of beginners do is they take that knowledge and they apply it upstairs in the supers. So this is a super here, I've got 11 SN4 Standard National self-spacing frames, and if I put this on top of a beehive everything would be fine, the bees would go up, they'd work everything out, they'd draw it out, cap the honey over, and you would come the end of the season, take the frame out like that, you would try and uncap it with a knife, and you would realize that your life has become very, very difficult. You're probably going to have to use a fork to get the wax off to get at the honey. And after hours, if not days of messing around with it, you'll realize that this video gave you a much, much better option. So let me show you a different option here. This is a wooden super with SN1 frames, frames that are not self-spacing with fixed metal castellations on a 10s configuration. What that means is that in a standard national box like this, you get 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 frames. Now it's not important the amount of frames that are in here because if you had this as a Langstroth box and it was down to here, you might only get 7 or 8 frames in. What is important is the distance between the centers of these frames here. I know for 10s that I can basically get my finger in perfectly. And believe it or not, what you can actually do on a 10s configuration is you can start off with foundation. So what people will normally tell you and what the textbooks tell you when it comes to using frame castellations like this is that you should only really be using them or start using than once the frames are fully drawn out. The idea being that as the bees draw them out like that on both sides, you're gonna get really nice fat combs that you can uncap and get all of that honey out really easily. But you have the caveat, you have to do it with drawn comb. Now, if we jump back over to this one here, remember we said this was a 10s configuration, 10 frames in a national box like this. If we were gonna put drawn combs in here and we wanted to get super extended drawn combs, we could use an 8 configuration or we could use a 9 configuration. So same size box as this, but just one less frame, and then they're all evenly distributed. You're effectively increasing that finger gap that I've got here. Now, if you were to go ahead and do this with foundation, and these are mistakes that all beginners get caught up with, you will end up with burr comb all over the place, and it'll be a complete and utter mess. And this is the reason you hear people saying if you're using castellations, you should use drawn comb to start off with. And if you've got drawn comb, brilliant, go ahead and use it. But here is the tip and here is the trick that I'm going to let you in on. Now remember I said the configuration isn't necessarily the number of frames, although in the UK that's how they use it. It's all about the distance between the frames. So as you can see, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, only 9 in this box here, but the spacing is exactly the same. For me, it's one chubby finger width all the way along. But with this configuration here, it's still a 10s spacing. And what a lot of people don't know is that with a 10 spacing, you can add foundation and you can start off with foundation. And it means you don't have to go through that really awkward process of putting all of the frames in the box and then getting the bees to draw them out and then transferring them over to these wider castellations. The combination of 10 spacing and foundation going in there is going to give you the tiniest amount of burr comb. It means that you've not got to switch over any of those frames. But most importantly, it means that when you come to the end of the season and you're trying to uncap that honey, when you're pulling these frames out, you're gonna be able to get the knife all the way down the front, exposing all of that honey to run out so you can place the frames directly in your extractor. This piece of advice here will save you hours and hours of time at the back end of the season, so make sure you're getting the spacing correct. If you're in the UK, you're looking for 10s castellations. And if you're anywhere else in the world and you've got top bars like this, just take one chubby finger, Run it all the way along, and you should be good to go.