Payola

Time to do some beekeeping.

This is an empty frame put in the hive to encourage the bees to build male drone cells and the queen to lay eggs in them. The varroa mite prefers the larger drone cells to the smaller female worker bee ones and thus when the frame is full of developing larvae, one can remove and destroy it, thus reducing the wretched mites.

The wax is almost pure white, the dark centre part is being prepared for the egg laying process. On the outside they would be storing honey. The form is the natural one that bees would build if we didn't use frames with a preformed sheet which has the pattern of the smaller cells. The process is quite "expensive" as the bees need to consume 8kg of honey to produce 1kg of wax.