Laurence Edwards shows how to use a car battery to embed wireless foundation onto wired beehive frames. Connect battery clips to the eyelets and tap briefly to melt the wax into place, then reuse the frame after the wax melts out.
Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. Today I'm going to show you how to embed wireless foundation into a wired frame using a car battery. So this is such a good, simple method, no-nonsense method for getting foundation embedded onto a wired frame. There's a separate video I'm doing at the moment showing you the pros and cons versus wired frames with wireless foundation versus wireless frames with wired foundation. My preference is always going to be wired frames and wireless foundation. It's a far superior end product, but it does take a little bit longer to get them to the point where you can use the frames. So this video though, specifically going to be a real quick one. I'm just going to show you how to get the wireless foundation onto your wired frame. If you want to see the video of how to wire a frame, I'll put a little link up and you can click directly through to that video so you can see how we get to this point. So take your wired frame, you want stainless steel wire, and you want to make it this sound. Needs to make a good nice plingy sound like that so that you've got the tension running through it. That means that your wire is going to run straight and And it will run true through your foundation. So we're using a Mini Plus frame today, so you need to cut your foundation to size. So all you do, pop your foundation in and just cut it a little bit short. Doesn't need to be perfectly accurate, just needs to fall on there nicely like that. And then you make sure that it sits nicely in the groove. And just to prove that this does work, the first thing we need to do is show you that if I do that, the foundation just flops out. So you want to get it sitting nicely in the groove up there. You don't want it sitting like that with a gap. You want it sitting in that top groove. Doesn't matter that it's not coming all the way down to the bottom for this frame because this is going to be a mini mating nuc. Highly unlikely for them to fill that with drone brood. If they do, chop it out, start again. If you're doing this in brood frames though, make sure your foundation goes all the way to the bottom. Otherwise, they'll just fill that with drone brood for the majority of the season. If you do it late on in the season, you might get lucky and they'll do it with work of comb, but just don't leave gaps like that. And a mini mating hive though is fine. So all you do is you set that up like that, push it into the groove, and then you want to take a car battery, make sure it's charged up, And then you just want to take 2 little clips like this, black and a red, wire them up the correct way. So really, really easy to do this. You just put the red in there, your black in there, so we're live now. And then take one of them, doesn't matter which one, and you just want to clip that on To the cable on that side. So I'll do a zoom up on that side over there so you can see what's going on. And then you just want to take the red and all you want to do is just tap the eyelets. Don't create a full circuit and leave it for any amount of time. You'll just burn through either the stainless steel wire or the foundation. You just want to tap it. And you'll see a couple of little ticks like that. And that's it, that's all it takes. I just, I tap it twice on each eyelet. And then you check it, and on the top side it's really difficult to see. If you look underneath though, you should see that the wax has melted enough and that cable is now embedded. And what you can see is if you shake it in both directions, the foundation is now embedded onto that cable. So it's not reached its full strength yet, but that's fine. That's not going to ever come out. As that wax solidifies a little bit more, which is probably done by now, that's going to be solid, but then as the bees draw out that foundation either side, your stainless steel wire is completely in the middle, and then it's really, really strong. So that was really quick. The benefits of the wired frame system versus the wired foundation system are, once that frame reaches the end of its usable life, you melt out all of the wax and you're back to square one, and you can just put a new piece of foundation in just like we've done there. Really quick, probably takes 10 seconds per frame just to kind of embed that piece of foundation onto your stainless steel wires. So that's it for today's video. No Nonsense Beekeeping, we give you short, quick, no-nonsense videos to help you become better beekeepers. So I hope you've enjoyed it. Please hit the subscribe button, please hit the bell so you're notified of every video, and I'll see you next time.
