Action

After coming to the realisation a few days ago (and published on my main journal), I set about doing something.

My first aim was to get as much of the dandelion honey out of the hives as possible. It wasn't going to be much as I had made a mistake back in April in setting up a honey box. However the one advantage was I could be sure it was only dandelion honey and not "left overs" from last year. Not exactly knowing wha I would find and thinking there may be some excess honey in the other boxes from 2013 which I could then extract seperately, I needed to prepare some empty foundation frames to replace these.

"Foundation" is a 1-2mm thick sheet of recycled beeswax embossed with the hexagonal form of a cell. The bees would naturally do all this themselves but the foundation when placed in a frame, speeds up the process and encourages the bees to fill the entire frame rather than construct their own heart shaped. It also encourages them to only build workerbee/honey size cells rather than the larger drone size cells which are only used to lay drone eggs.

To fix the foundation in the frame, one normally threads stainless steel wire across the frame (either vertically or horzontally) and then using an electric charge, heat the wire and thus melting the sheet in to the wire. Given the sheets are so thin, one needs to get the heat just right so that the wire doesn't overheat and cut right through.

There are electrical gadgets for the purpose costing 40-60 Euros but it is possible to build your own. Research on the internet revealed thousands of results with all sorts of wonderful ideas starting from car batteries and probably ending up with nuclear reactors. To be honest, 99.9% was absolute jibberish for me as I don't understand volt let alone mAh, joules, or anything electric and the stuff scares me to death. The only currents I like are those in a hotXbun. However at 6:00am on a Sunday morning, I had to take the risk. Found a broken 1990's halogen desklamp, weighing a ton with an enormous transformer and a switch for high & low power. Thought this may increase my chances of getting the right amount of heat.

With great trepidation and careful not to come in to contact with any metal bits, I placed a sheet of foundation on a wired frame, one contact at the start of the wire and another at the end. The tiny spark which emerged did give me a moments grief but the lights stayed on and no fuses tripped and then I saw the wax & wire slowly merging. It worked a treat!

In the Blip on the right a prepared empty wire frame and on the left one with a melted in foundation. Quite proud of myself despite not being perfect. I didn't have a wire tightener so the wires were not quite as taut as they should have been.

So MrB's "learning by doing" method is bearing fruit. A few more mistakes made and a few more lessons learnt and these types of lessons are the ones one doesn't make twice.