In this 18‑minute YouTube talk, UK beekeeper Laurence Edwards compares wooden frames with wax foundation to single‑molded plastic frames coated in wax. Drawing on 18 months of side‑by‑side colony experience, he explains that wooden frames build up roughly four times faster, especially in the cool early‑season UK climate, leading to quicker brood expansion and honey supers. He acknowledges that once plastic frames are fully drawn out they perform similarly to wood, but they are heavier, slower to draw, harder to recycle, and present disease‑management challenges. He notes lower drone‑brood placement in plastic frames and suggests they work better in warmer regions. Throughout, he encourages beekeepers to test both types themselves, weighing speed, weight, and seasonal suitability, and invites viewers to share their preferences.
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Plastic versus wooden frames, which one is best? Inside this colony here, I have got a mixture of wooden and plastic frames. The plastic frames are single molded, they were coated with wax, and the wooden frames have just got wax foundation in them. I have run these now for about 18 months, and in this video I'm going to tell you what I prefer most, whether it's the fully molded plastic frame with wax covering Or it's the wooden frame with the wax foundation. I'm not going to make you wait until the end in classic YouTube style. I prefer the wooden frames with wax foundation by at least a factor of 4. In this video though, I'm going to tell you why I much prefer the wooden ones over the plastic. Let's get inside though and show you some of the differences first, to give you some of the justification as to why I prefer the wood. So for context, this colony here started off overwintering as a 6-frame nuc on plastic frames. They hadn't filled out the plastic frames fully, so I fed them a little bit. They still didn't fill out the plastic frames fully, so I fed them a little bit more. I had exactly the same colony over to the other side next to it that was on 6 frames. These are 14 by 12s, but the same frame size on wooden ones. By the time the plastic ones had been fully filled up, and remember these nucs were the same size, fully drawn out, or at least 80 or 90% drawn out, the box next to it had filled the brood box and put 2 supers of honey on. So when I say I like the wooden ones 4 times more, The 4 times for me is the speed I find in which they build up compared to the wooden ones. This box here, this wooden box was placed on 2 weeks ago, and look, already 2 weeks' work on wooden frames, fully drawn out both sides full of nectar. Again, fully drawn out both sides full of nectar. Kind of get the idea. Look at that, brood in all stages, but mostly just perfectly capped. Brood. Buckfast queens available from blackmountainhoney.co.uk. Kind of get the idea, don't you? When I tried doing this with plastic frames, the bees just weren't interested in drawing it out in the same way. And as a beekeeper who wants rapid expansion in order to make splits and in order to get a decent honey crop, why would I want to slow my bees down massively with plastic frames? It just doesn't make any sense. And you might think, especially if you're one of the people that told me plastic frames definitely wouldn't work. Well, why did you bother trying it? It comes down to my experience with what people sometimes tell me, and it's, it's not always the case. And I would say take my advice with a pinch of salt and, you know, try it on your own colonies and see what works for you. I always think that's a really good idea in beekeeping. But what people said to me with plastic frames and foundation, they potentially warp, they're really hard to recycle, they're difficult if you get disease in them. But the main problem that I have with them, or people when they were giving me the advice said, is that they're so so slow to get them drawn out, and then when the bees do draw them out, they don't draw them out properly, so they'll miss certain bits of it, or they'll draw it out in a really wonky way, and you've got to kind of like scrape it back and put it back together again. Now you might think this is me just hating on the plastic frames, and it's not. Once you get the plastic frames drawn out, fully drawn out, awesome, and you can just use them every year. And once they get past their usable life in terms of the wax, you can scrape them back, put them back in again. Hopefully the bees will work them relatively quickly. But to get them to that point, oh, it has taken me so, so long. So what I've got down here in the frame below is a mixture of wooden frames and a mixture of plastic frames that were previously drawn out. And as you can see, again, they have 100% drawn out, the plastic ones. But as I said, let me give you the balance to the argument, because these plastic ones now, these are fully, fully drawn out. And once they're fully drawn out, I am not complaining at all. If I could get all of my plastic frames looking like that, I would be a happy man. And would I exchange that for slow buildup? Probably not, because they're a little bit heavier and I've still got the potential disease issue that I might have. But once they're drawn out like that, the bees use them just as well as any other frame. Like I said, you can't really be too angry at that, can you? That is quite Quite an extraordinary brood pattern. And with— oh, leave that in. And as with all of these videos here, I said before, it's not me telling you don't use plastic, use wood with wax because it's better. Just giving you my own experience. You might have a complete opposite experience, and I do recommend for people to try it out for yourself. Get one box, plastic foundation or plastic frame, see how you go, and then take it from there. You You can see they have now fully drawn out all of these frames, so I'm very, very happy with them. But as we start to move through, you'll see that we've got like wasted space at the bottom of some of these frames, and this is what was continually happening early on in the season when I didn't have that warm weather. So I've come to the conclusion now, and this is why I think they work a lot better in places like some of the southern states of America. If you get the warm weather, the bees will take to them. If you get the correct flow conditions, the bees will take to them. If you're expecting the bees to expand into them in, say, the middle of April in the UK and to use up all the space, you're definitely going to be disappointed. One of the other things I really like about these frames here is the lack of drone brood. I find they don't put anywhere near as much drone brood into these frames than they would, say, with a wax frame when they've got free license to do pretty much what they want. Now, time of the year is going to dictate that a little bit as well. It's getting late into the year now, so you're much more likely to get worker brood. But do it in April or do it in May, and I find with the wax ones they will put in quite a high percentage of drone brood. We'll just finish off there with another lovely Frames and Feeders plastic frame with a beautiful brood pattern. So what's my conclusion? The end result, once you get the frames fully drawn out, I would say they are pretty much identical. Would I have a preference? Ever so slightly towards the wooden wax because I think the plastic is slightly heavier and I'm always concerned that if I got disease, I'm not 100% sure what to do. But in terms of general usability, once you get them drawn out, Both exactly the same, got no problems at all. The only gripe that I have, and the reason that I won't be buying any more plastic frames, is due to the slow buildup, the lack of suitability to the early season in the UK with the poor temperatures. And that is pretty much the only reason. You can see there, back end of the season, they're doing well, they're filling the frames, there's lots of brood, wonderful frames. Like, some of the best frames I've got are on my Frames and Feeders frames. It's just the time taken to get there that I find for my style of beekeeping is just a little bit too slow. So what do you prefer? Wooden frames, wax foundation, plastic frames with foundation, or wooden frames with plastic foundation? Stick it in the comments, I'd love to know.
