Plain Talk: To Wire Frames or Not (228)

Episode 228 – Plain Talk: To Wire Frames or Not

Jim Tew: Hi, listeners. It's Jim again, back in the bee yard, looking and thinking and talking about bees. Listeners, I write articles and I do podcasts, and of course, when you talk to other beekeepers, you elicit other responses. You'd like for them to always be positive, and frequently, they are, but sometimes you get those where you said something that someone just did not agree with.

I made a comment in an article I wrote for the American Bee Journal back in March of this year, 2025, and I can't do any better than just read you what I wrote as a passing footnote. I wrote, "Personally, I wonder how many of you still use eyelets, wiring devices, and embedding procedures. It can't be many of you. Have we reached a point where I should stop referring to wired frames and articles in electronic media? Honestly, I've not wired a frame and embedded those wires in fat wax foundation in many years. If I don't hear from anyone, I think that I will allocate wiring frames and embedding foundation as a bygone practice."

That was an innocent comment. I haven't talked to anybody who wired and embedded frames in years.

Jim: We all use the snap-in foundation inserts. I got a positive earful, and that made me wonder about you. Do you people still go through the process of wiring and embedding those wires in wax foundation? I want to talk to you about it. I'm Jim Tew, and I'm here at Honey Bee Obscura, where I talk about something to do with plain-talk beekeeping every week.

Introduction: Welcome to Honey Bee Obscura, brought to you by Growing Planet Media, the producers of the Beekeeping Today Podcast. Join Jim Tew, your guide through the complexities, the beauty, the fun, and the challenges of managing honeybees. Jim hosts fun and interesting guests who take a deep dive into the intricate world of honeybees. Whether you're a seasoned beekeeper or just getting started, get ready for some plain talk that'll delve into all things honeybees.

Jim: Listeners, can I start out with a typical discussion? I'm outside here with the bees. The rain's coming, but it's not here yet. Bees are active, and they're coming back just loaded with pollen. I've talked to you about this colony I'm looking at. If I don't split it, it's going to swarm. I keep thinking, "Get out here, get out here," but every day, there's more rain, more cold, whatever. I keep putting it off.

I hope the wind's not too bad. Listeners, when I spoke of the foundation thing, it was a passing comment. I always sound like that I grew up in a cave, keeping bees on the side of a cliff or something, but in reality, in the scheme of things, it wasn't that long ago, 53, 54 years ago or so. In my earliest days, from the Root company or from the Dadant company, you bought three-ply foundation, which was exactly what it sounds like. It was a sheet of foundation that was three sheets of foundation that were amalgamated into one sheet, and you get this plywood effect.

That three-ply foundation had more rigidity, more strength than just one single roll, a sheet of foundation. You would wire the frame up after putting eyelets in the holes, in the end bars, and then capture that sheet of foundation with a cleat or in the groove or whatever. There's actually a wax tube fastener that was used primarily for comb honey production, but if you wanted to, you could use the wax tube fastener, and you could actually use molten beeswax as a caulking-type material to secure that wax and that uppermost groove.

Then once you had the foundation sheet up against the wires, then you would use a contraption. It's a simple device, it was just electric contacts on each end. Honestly, listeners, I use my Lionel electric train transformer as an energy source. In the '20s and '30s, beekeepers used common dry cell batteries, or you could use a battery charger. You can get the voltage, and all you have to do is just touch it, just touch that trigger, and that wire would short out, heat up immediately, and then gently melt into that three-ply foundation.

By the time I did all that, I bet you I averaged 10 to 15 minutes per frame to get that foundation sheet in there and get it embedded and get it ready to go. As you know and as I bet you most of you have done, we use foundation inserts now. You just snap those foundation sheets in, it's brain-dead. Snap, snap, and it's gone, and everything works well. I received more comments, and more is not hundreds, more is probably 15, maybe 18 comments. Does that sound like the earth moved? Normally, I get no comments, or maybe one comment, and you just pray that it was not something that you said that was offensive.

Every day, another comment came in, "No, no, I use foundation. I've used foundation forever. I would never use foundation." One read like this, "Dr. Tew, thank you for your report in the Bee Journal. I enjoy reading them, and I learn or remember something each time I read. I'm a third-generation beekeeper. My father and grandfather, as well as my uncle, were commercial beekeepers in the '50s, '60s, and '70s, and the early '80s. I still have about a dozen hives. I've just got finished making up 100 medium and 40 deep frames, wood, wax, and wire. I don't want any of that plastic in my hives if I can possibly avoid it. Maybe some Duragilt, not much more."

That's just one example of the kind of responses that I got. People were serious about this wiring thing. I was relieved to hear it. Why? Because I can talk to you at length about what it was like to try to make comb honey and beeway basswood squares, and what you had to go to fold those basswood sections and the basswood trees that are superb honey sources that had to be cut down to make those basswood boxes. 4 x 5 sections, plain beeway sections, split 4.5 x 4.5 sections, they were all there.

In the '20s, apparently, there was even-- I'm off the subject. In the '20s there was actually a Pullman railroad car sections that were 1.5 inches, so square, little tiny squares. Instead of the Smucker's jelly pack at breakfast, you got this tiny little wood square of honey. The bees just hated those things, or so I've read. I've never seen one. That technology is gone. What we use now is various plastic devices like the clamshell packs or the rounds or whatever, but the basswood sections are mostly gone.

I was relieved in a way to find out that at least this particular management scheme from my earliest years of beekeeping has a strong component still. While you think of your stories and put your opinions together, let's hear from our sponsor here.

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Jim: It's chocolate and vanilla. It's yes and no. It's up and down. It's two different techniques. When you wire the frames, you're not trying to string those wires banjo-tight. In fact, some of the wiring gadgets from the '20s and '30s had clamps and braces that would put a spring, a tension, bow the end bars in, and bow the bottom bar up, and then you would just wire the frame comfortably tight, and then when you release the devices that were holding this frame under tension, it would spring back and really tighten those wires up.

The intent was not to have them just so you could strum a tune. The wiring intent was just to have them tight enough to hold that comb in place so several things did not happen. Number 1, on hot summer days in the deep south, those frames would not sag and distort under the weight of honey and brood. Number 2, another main reason was when that frame went into the extractor, it would withstand the centrifugal force of the extractor with the heavy weight of honey bearing down on it and not destroy the frame every time.

I am not a historian, I'm just an old guy, but I have read passing comments about those fellows who, in the earliest days, thought that putting in foundation was the absolute way to go until they found this stuff would literally fall out of the combs. Now, I've never heard of anything being tried other than wiring. No doubt others did. In the past, there were plastic grids and things you snapped on over the foundation to hold it and support it while comb was drawn on it.

After it had two or three seasons on it, which would be an old frame now, but in the old days, a comb would last for decades. Once it had two or three seasons on it, you could almost stand on that comb and it would withstand every one of the forces you applied to it. While that comb was nice, white, new, it was fragile. Can you tell that there's two games afoot? One is where you put a lot of effort into putting the frame together with the foundation. You wire it, you embed it, you get it ready to go, and then when you're done, it's all beeswax except for the wire.

A quick aside, the bees don't like those wires. Sometimes, during a light flow, they will cut down and dig those wires out as though they're going to remove them. I think, alternatively, sometimes, they're just using that foundation wax someplace else in the colony where they needed it more. A lot of effort, isn't it? You end up with the basis for a comb that is all beeswax.

The second game afoot is the modern-day foundation insert. Oh man, I'd like to get off the subject here too. To get to this point, you would not believe all the different ideas that are on the scrap heap of beekeeping life right now. In the late '80s, '90s, there were efforts to make solid plastic comb that required nothing but the bees to fill it and then cap it. The goal was to get everything turned into honey and not require the bees to use 8 lbs of honey to produce 1 lb of wax, making it a expensive product for the hive.

The effort was to short-circuit all that and have that extra honey. Of course, the bees took a really dim view of a solid plastic frame. You can believe this, the thing was lead-heavy. Just 10 frames of empty, full plastic combs was stunningly heavy. Then when you added wax and honey to it, even more so. We went through all kinds of other options. Should I mention the aluminum combs? When? During the '30s and '40s, you could buy an aluminum comb. The idea was for the bees, once again, not to have to produce any wax. They would just fill up this aluminum comb.

Imagine how the wax moths were short-circuited trying to eat aluminum with all they can cut through. They couldn't cut through it. Think about it. What was the fatal flaw of the many possible flaws, but what was the fatal flaw from making combs out of aluminum? Indeed, even making foundation out of aluminum. Heat stabilization. In the winter months, those exposed edges of that aluminum frame would wick coldness toward the center, making it nigh upon impossible for the bees to maintain wintering temperatures on top of that aluminum foundation that was wicking cold—coldness would be a better term—from the outer edges of the frame. Bees died like crazy.

Not before a lot of that stuff was manufactured and not before a lot of beekeepers gave up on it. We did not just go, boom, from beeswax foundation to foundation inserts. It was a tortuous path with ideas tried, ideas not working, ideas working okay, to get to the point that we've got this plastic foundation. One of the things that the proponents of beeswax foundation used was that they are concerned about this whole concept of microplastics in our food, and specifically about microplastics in our honey.

If you put in black plastic, which has already got a bad reputation in some circles, if you put in black plastic, then you were just going to be having microscopic amounts of plastic throughout your honey crop. Do I want to go down this rabbit hole? I guess I do, but I don't want to get too far down the rabbit hole. Are you going to put honey in plastic jars? Are you going to store honey in plastic 5-gallon cans? Are you going to run your honey through piping that's made of plastic?

Exactly where would we draw the line on not using plastic in our beekeeping operation? That's a personal line. You've got to draw the line wherever you think you want it. One of the reasons that several people used for wanting nothing to do with plastic in their foundation sheets was trying to keep plastic as much as possible out of their colony. I need to quickly say that, right now, there are beehives that are plastic from top to bottom. The boxes are plastic, the bottom is plastic, the inner cover, the top, the frames are plastic, the foundation's plastic.

These plastic beehives are readily available. You can buy them anywhere. They are remarkably common. There have been efforts to use plastic as a beehive material as far back as the '70s. The Walter T. Kelley Company manufactured really heavy-duty plastic boxes that, as usual, wax moths couldn't eat. Consequently, that was one less problem that they had to deal with. This is where I'm trying to get to. All of a sudden, it looks like we've got these foundation inserts. I'm saying that it was not all of a sudden, that it took time to get to that point.

One of the things I've often wondered, I did a quick calculation, it was simple, and I can't remember exactly what my numbers were, but I will reassure you that the guess that I'm about to give you is reasonably accurate. The thickness of a foundation insert is about 15 times that of the thickness of a natural comb midrib. I wondered if it had any negative effects on the bees' wintering ability, on their behavior.

I don't know if bees try to communicate through the comb. When they're doing the dance language procedure, for instance, and they're vibrating, and queens are vibrating their ventral surface of their thorax against the comb, does that heavy insert in the middle of the comb have any effect on the bees? I don't know. There was a quick study. I don't want you to hang your hat on it, because I can't give you the exact citation, but there was a quick study that said, "Well, they couldn't tell any difference." I would like for that to be the answer.

Right now, we have two procedures. You can use the 1920 procedure, 1930s procedure of wiring the frames and installing eyelets and embedding the wires, or you can use the alternate, "modern procedure," where everything is just snap, snap, snap. You decide that you want quick and dirty, ergo, plastic inserts, or do you want to go back to the old ways and use the technique that's been done soon to be for 100 years, and all the evolution and development that went into that procedure.

I said before, it's chocolate and vanilla. I really stumbled into a hornet's nest [chuckles]. Not a negative. People were very polite. People were very kind. They were not ugly to me. One person specifically said, "Please don't relegate this procedure to the scrap heap. We still enjoy doing it." Two people specifically said that it was zen-like. There it is. If you still like to wire and embed and spend the time doing it, I wouldn't mind hearing from you. I got to tell you that, if you do enjoy doing it, you've got a lot of company.

There are actually some famous beekeepers who still use this procedure. If you do it, you're in good company. That's it for now. Wire if you want to, use foundation inserts if you want to. It's your decision. Until we talk next week, I'm Jim, telling you bye.

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