🐝 How To Look After Your Frames - They Are Worth Their Weight in Gold

In this video, I'm going to tell you where to store your wax frames over winter. Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. I've been asked this question a lot, so I'm going to do a video on it. That is, where to store your wax frames over winter. And when I say wax frames, I'm talking drawn wax frames. Something you really do want to preserve and something that lots of different pests want to get their hands on. So there's loads of different methods for doing this, and there's a couple of different methods that I use as well. So there's a big argument at the beginning. Do you store the frames wet or do you store them dry? What that means, storing them dry, is that once you've extracted the honey out of your super frames, you give it back to the bees, preferably not in an open environment, so enclosed within the same beehive that the super frames came from. And then you let the bees clean them up. Gonna do that on a separate video, but essentially what you end up with is a dry super frame. This is what a dry super frame looks like. So as you can see, we've got drawn wax comb, little bit foundation in this corner, but this was used to store a little bit of honey. As you can see, it's perfectly dry. I'll just crumble a little bit there. You can see that bone dry. So that is what we mean when we say a dry wax comb. The other way to store them is store them wet. So that is, you extract your honey out of the frames, you put them back in the boxes, and you do nothing with them. So they're not soaking wet, there's no water involved, they're wet with honey residue. 2 ways of doing it, wet or dry. Personally, I keep them all dry. So I put them back on their beehive, I let the bees dry them down, and I'm going to cover my method of storage at the end of this video. Because I do do it a little bit different from everyone else. But in terms of my recommendation though, I would recommend the wet way, so keeping your frames wet and storing them wet over winter. And I recommend it for 2 reasons. Firstly, it's a very good deterrent for wax moth. Wax moth is your biggest enemy over winter. They get their way in, they eat the wax, they lay their eggs, that turns into further wax moth, And then they ravage through all of your frames. Don't let people tell you that they only go for brood frames. They definitely go for wax in super frames as well. However, they much, much prefer brood frames. Dark, manky brood frames is where they'll go first. They've got nothing else though, they will go for wax in the super frame. For some reason though, storing them wet seems to deter wax moth. So if you're going to store them wet, the best method I can suggest is to get some crown boards, Cut some pieces of ply to the same size as a wooden national, stack them up in stacks of 4, and in between every 2 supers you put either a sheet of newspaper or preferably a piece of Perspex or a piece of plywood, something solid. Then take a ratchet strap, wrap that all the way around so at the top you've got a piece of plywood, bottom you've got a piece of plywood, and then you're interspersing that plywood in between, and then you've got your wet frames within the supers in between. Ratchet that up really tight, make sure there's no gaps anywhere. And then as an extra method to make sure there's no gaps, you can wrap it in plastic. Not ideal, I know, because there's a bit of plastic waste there, but that is a belt and braces method for storing your supers wet, storing your frames wet over winter. The real super benefit that you get from that though is come the spring when you're trying to tease those bees up Up into the supers. If you put on a super of dry frames, the bees have really got no incentive to go up there. If you put on a super of wet frames, the bees will be up there in seconds licking clean all of that residue, and it does seem to help attract them up a lot quicker than using dry frames. However, you do need a lot of indoor space in order to do that well, so that is not the method that I use. The method that I use, I use the dry method, so I go and get my bees to clean up all of those frames, and then luckily in North Wales, because we get such blasts of cold temperature over winter, I keep them outside. So we're not talking about just like leaving them outside in the rain, they're undercover outside in a cool environment that's really subjected to frosts over winter, and then I follow all of the same procedures, but all I do is I use roofs instead of pieces of plywood. And then the only thing you need to worry about then is protecting that from vermin. So rats, mice, squirrels. I have it in a lockable container that's not insulated and drops below freezing many times throughout the year. With this method, you do sometimes get a little bit of wax moth, not a huge amount, because as soon as that cold weather comes, the freeze kills everything. They can't cope with it and it dies out. This frame here is a perfect example of that. So as you can see, we've got a used 14 by 12 frame, some bits of pollen in it as well. This has been stored dry outside, and as you can see, we've got a little bit of wax moth damage, just a little bit down there. Now these are not active wax moths. If these were active, you would see this moving all the way throughout. You'd see them wriggling down in there as well. There's been a small wax moth infestation And then the cold weather has killed them off. Pull out the next frame along, and as you can see, no wax moth infestation whatsoever. And as you can see, this is a used brood frame. This is like the perfect thing that wax moths are looking for. This is what they want to find. They found it underneath there. They couldn't handle the cold temperature. So as with everything with beekeeping, you need to find what works for you. In an ideal situation, I would store all of my boxes wet. I would put the plywood sheet in between every single box. I would ratchet them up. I would strap them with plastic, and I would store them undercover in a cool environment like a barn. Barn would be absolutely perfect with a little bit of airflow in there as well. That would work really, really well. I don't have access to that though. I've got access to a very small back of a Luton van And that's where I stack all of mine. So I have a slightly limited, different way of doing it. And the problem that I have with that Luton van as well is that it's not fully secure from, say, a squirrel. I had a squirrel get in there, did quite a lot of damage to the boxes. So if you get any vermin in there, you do get a lot of damage done. And I find this is the problem, in my opinion, in my situation with wet frames, is they attract more vermin. Better at defending against the wax moth. They don't seem to like it as much, but the mice, the rats, the squirrels, the badgers, anything you can think of, they'll go for those wet frames when the food is scarce over winter. That's my only reason for going dry, is because of my setup at the moment. So in terms of a recommendation to you, I would recommend if you've got the space to do it, go for a wet frame stored in the way that I said. Put them in the supers, Put plywood inserts in between, ratchet it up, strap it with plastic, keep it off the ground, store it somewhere cool. You'll get them through the winter and they will do really, really well when you put them back onto the colony. If it's a little bit less secure, maybe go with a drying method. Keep them somewhere where you can keep it nice and cool, or you can take advantage of the winter weather to keep it cool, and you should get your frames through with minimal damage. Definitely do not keep any of those boxes in a warm, heated environment. It's the worst possible thing you can do. It really does give the wax moth the best chance of getting through the winter and causing havoc in your supers and your brood frames. So good luck getting your frames through winter. I have reasonable success with it. Either of those methods there I think will do pretty well. It's just the temperature you need to watch out for. As always, please hit the subscribe button, please hit the bell so you're notified of every video, and I'll see you next time. Bye.