🔵Complete Guide to Making More Comb!

all right action this is the second most important thing you have as a beekeeper and that's drawn comb you need to protect it the bees are the only thing more important in my opinion than the drawn comb with drawn comb you can make splits easier you can make more honey keep your bees from swarming just kind of go hand in hand there's just so many things that comb can help you with but how do you get it drawn and as a new beekeeper there's a lot of variables and there's a lot of bad information about this so so I saw a question on my YouTube channel by Glenn Martin because he was asking some good questions and a lot of times I forget this is my 23rd or 24th year I forget those first and second and fourth year questions and what he asked was hey I would like to do single brood management and I have a box that's 70 80% drawn can I put an excluder on and add some supers fair question and the answer is maybe so I I proceeded ask him a question do you have foundations or do you have combs to give them after that and he only has foundations so in that case you can't use them foundations bees do not view this whether it's wax Foundation or plastic with a coating of wax and we're going to talk about wax here in a second bees don't view foundations as theirs they don't look at this and go ooh one day I'm going to store something in that but once you get them to commit to to drawing them out and there's a lot of things we can do to help them with that once they draw them out then you're off to the races but metime if you're in the middle of a Blackberry Blossom flow and it's really strong and I have seen bees put 10 to 20 lounds an nectar easily in a day and you only have this on top and you've got a single or whatever the hive is and let me show you these hives over here this are some uh swarms that I just caught from my bees we we do send a swarm or two off this is what you would call a single one deep box so Glenn's got 70% and that's a good number we'll go ahead and talk about that really quick once your box a brew chamber gets to 70% drawn it is time to add another one take a frame of eggs or young larae pull that into a second brood box and then keep keep feeding and once that top box gets about 70 to 80% full you're going to do a couple things first of all any foundations that weren't drawn well in the bottom box you're going to pull those up drop Combs down and because bees work better going up because heat rises and you're going to move those around and get those drawn as well and then at the same time if you're wanting to do mediums for honey supers then you're going to add a medium box as well and don't don't put an excluder on that's another really important tip to getting Combs drawn is bees again they don't want to pass through an excluder to get to foundations once they draw these into Combs they will pass through that excluder like it's not even there but between an excluder and Foundations above there's really nothing enticing them to go above that so just put your supers on without an excluder first and get them on before colony is already packed and all the other space that it has so that they can start working on that and then once they have drawn this out a little bit maybe your queen has worked her way up there a little bit and it's okay to get a little bit of brood in the first round or so it's okay just a let's say that they've drawn three frames fully in this box of mediums well we're coming back and like all right they've got some Combs up in here now we're cooking with oil and we can gently shake those frames down so we get our Queen for sure down into the brute area and then we can put a queen excluder and now those bees will pure that excluder wonderfully and same principle once this is got about six to seven frames drawn pull one up or so into another one and maybe the first year especially if you know that your flow's over you can keep feeding for a while boy this is going to be a long video we got a lot of stuff still to talk about so foundations how much coating do they have oh so much to talk about so I've got a box of drawn Combs here let's say you've already got a little bit of drawn comb but you don't have a lot we've got a nice box of drawn Combs this is so valuable right here I have some of these that are pushing 20 years and they are just as useful as ever they only stay on the high for me about two and 1/2 months maybe 3 months tops before they're hauled off and extracted and so we don't let the Queens lay in them we don't put any treatments on while they're on these are just pure beeswax foundations uh Combs and they'll be just fine but let's say you don't have a lot of those and you're wanting to get those drawn want to get these drawn what we're going to do is take this one out perfect frame right there and we are just going to stick this right in the middle because the bees will want to fill that with nectar quite quickly During a flow and when they do that they're going to go well dang it why is there not any Combs adjacent to this which is very normal for bees and they will want to draw these found foundations out very quickly because of that and that frame just does not want to do what I want it to do it must be something in beekeeping this Foundation is going to go right into here and here's a little tip as well when you draw these out there needs to be 10 in there and a 10 frame box but once they're drawn or very darn close then you can pull one of them out and space them to nine and you get a lot wider Combs they will extend them out and create a fat comb and it's very easy to uncap that with a knife and it's just a the only way to do it in my opinion you can do tins but they're so skinny it's it makes it very difficult to uncap those now in this case though we have a foundation with eight Combs what we're going to do is pull these two close and we're going to evenly space these other Combs off to the side and uh that'll work just fine these will be a little bit extra spacious and they'll get even fatter but that'll be okay once they get this one drawn you can space them back out if you have the time but pulling this bait comb up into a foundation a box of foundation makes a big big difference okay let's let's talk about the coat on these foundations because that makes a really big difference and there's beeswax foundations that have they just solid beeswax and that's how everybody used to do it you get that pressed at Walter T Kelly or somewhere like that and then you would wire those in we used to do that and I did it for years after plastic was going and then a buddy of mine like why are you doing that and then we realized we could go 10 times faster with this and and we also could reuse them and we could use our own wax if we ever needed to something happened a single coat of wax from a manufacturer typically is around 11 to 12 gram of beeswax on there to put that into perspective a pound of wax is about 450 gram give or take I can't quite remember but it's real close and so that's not a whole lot of wax on a itic Foundation just a single coat two would be around 22 to 24 G my personal opinion don't buy anything less than double wax you know some of the companies have different terms like this is Premiere so they have uh heavy wax and then extra heavy extra heavy would be their double and that's I wouldn't settle for anything less than double personally now does that mean that you can't work with single coat absolutely a lot of it dep depends on the colony these swarms that are over here they're really good at drawing Combs you know why because they're all the right age of bees older bees draw Combs very good they're the ones that produce the wax young bees are the ones that produce royal jelly worker jelly clean cells and other jobs bees are just absolutely amazing on all the different roles that they go through if you don't know all the different things that they do going from emerging from the cell to the end of their life it's action-packed so that being said a swarm is really good at drawing typically for a number of reasons they swarm During a flow it's the right age of bees and typically a swarm has a queen with it that's already proven she was strong enough to get them big enough to swarm a WellMed queen that has good genetic diversity has been proven to produce over 25% more comb and the same amount of time as a colony that had an inferior queen that wasn't made near as good same time span all of those things so how good your queen is is important how good the flow is is important so if you have a really good flow and you have bees of the right age and they're ready to go well yeah single wax will work just fine but what if the flow is not for 3 weeks away and those bees aren't the right age and all those kinds of things well a couple of things could happen when you have foundations whether it's wax Foundation or plastic foundation with a wax coating is the bees when there's nothing going on in a dirt they will chip the wax off of the plastic and if you have wax Foundation solid bees wax they will eat eat chew holes through it and they repurpose that they mix it with propolis and they use that to cap brood cells and and multiple other things but again they don't care about Foundation it's they don't view that as their stuff they would never do that to comb if it's in good shape but Foundation they will chip the wax right off of this and they definitely will chew holes through wax foundation so understanding your seasonal flows is important now this isn't going to happen over a week or two but if it's been sitting in there for multiple months and the bees have had no flow going on for for me I'm going to have to recat all these plastic foundations again my flow ends around June 15th give or take depending on the rainfall and several other things and I know this because I've been doing this a long time in this region and we keep records it's really important for you to talk to people nearby who have a general idea and don't just ask one person unless you know for sure that they know what they're talking about because sometimes we as beekeepers we just don't I get told that on YouTube all the time I don't usually listen to those people but then when my wife tells me that I usually feel pretty bad so we don't want to leave this in there for a long period of time because bees will chip that wax off of there so pay attention to that one of the stories I heard that this is kind of on a segue here but the flow hives they have all of the movable oh goodness the uh it moves to be able to basically cut the Combs and then drain back into it and so it has all these little segments in in it and if you leave those on for months in a dir the bees will beg glue that down and propol that same thing like nobody's business and it will take you hundreds of hours sometimes to clean that up unless someone's figured out a quick solution because the bees probably put hundreds of hours gluing it down so there's no good reason to leave equipment on beehives when they don't need it part of beekeeping is giving them space when they need it and remov moving it when they don't need it and that is a really good thing that we do with the bees we coexist with them understanding the seasonal flows and taking away and helping with the thermal dynamics a tree cavity and stuff like that doesn't work I think one of the reasons most bees die going out into the wild blue yonder is finding a good cavity that has all the things that they need as beekeepers we can really help with that all right let's get back to the main topic though what's a good coat of wax like I've said a single coat is good enough with all the conditions right but a double coat is a lot more forgiving and if you have a small Colony like a nucleus Colony or a colony that's you know just trying to get itself going the extra wax really helps and that's really what I want to talk to you about a lot on this video is a good code of wax down below I'm going to leave a link to a video where we are rolling wax onto this it's very easy to do it's a short video I'm going to have that in the description and down in the comments below but when I put wax on we're getting close to 40 to 50 grams of wax per sheet and that's a whole lot more and it makes a lot of difference makes a lot of difference especially on little colonies think about this though you have a flow going on and you don't have any more Combs to give them you need those Combs foundations drawn as fast as possible a heavy coat is going to help tremendously now there's a point where too much is just too much I mean it's just like anything water's good for you drink too much but it you're going to drown it's kind of dumb isn't it Laurel my grandpa told me that one it was funny this Foundation right here check this out you have all of this sprayed with wax but you have a little bit of extra wax that was sprayed a little bit heavier in that spot that's not a problem but I know beekeepers who literally put so much wax they fill all the cells or most of them all the way up this is an egregious excess of wax it doesn't do any good when the bees make Combs without Foundation of any kind it's not flat it goes in to a point on the other side the bees need that Gap space down in there and if you put a bunch of it in in there you're creating a lot of work for them to do with a roller and a a little bit of gentle pressure in that video you can just quickly roll this and create a lot more soft malleable wax and grades of wax are really important too this just keeps going but there's a lot to this don't buy that Wing yong's Foundation off of Amazon I'm not trying to offend anybody but a lot of that stuff on Amazon that has the weird names is not made the USA if you're not from the USA well I'm sorry um there's a lot of good countries that have good foundation but the sketchy ones that come from China A lot of times they're diluted with paraffins and this is proven there's been a lot of problems in Europe there's been problems in the US with people getting beeswax and some of that stuff that you're buying like little beads of beeswax that's sometimes not beeswax so I'm a really big fan of knowing where my Foundation or if I had to buy wax knowing who it comes from unfortunately we deal with a lot of fraud in beekeeping people doing fake honey people doing fake waxes and bees will not draw it good if there's paraffin mixed in that beeswax they will not want to draw that very good at all and do you really want that with touching your honey I don't I don't think I want that on there the the other thing to consider and this just dawned upon me this is a really I think important as well is let's say we have a comb here and I guess we have a b so we have this this isn't a problem this is just a little bit of Comb they've extended down but whenever I put a comb next to some foundations I always make sure or if I am putting a box on top I always make sure I trim the wax off the top of the top bars and any Combs on the sides of significance because guess what when before they start drawing on your foundations they are going to draw off of those cells first or the brood cells up on top because that is theirs it's their comb and so if they're like we're going to start drawing over here we're going to start here and what happens is if you have a funny bit of Comb right here they might just start drawing it down from in between instead of drawing it on your foundation first and that's where you get a lot of the funny Combs that go down your foundations most of the time it's because there is a poor coat of wax on there and we have had some companies who have purchased some cheap wax and I'm not going to name any names but some of these guys are getting their foundations now from China there's a lot of good companies out there and I guess we'll talk about that now um stick to the American companies if you're you're in the US there's a lot of good ones there's acorn there's motherload there's man Lake there's well D's from China um that's what I've seen unless they've changed something you have Premiere you have oh goodness they're just going out the window there's a lot of Good Foundations out there that you can buy pero I've used all of those companies and not just one or two thousands of each one and honestly the plastic it helps a little bit but they all work good if they have a good beeswax coat that's the most important thing is the coat so get a good coat on there you can be happy with any of those companies as long as the code is good what about letting this sit around if let's say you have this Frame and you're don't need it you got a bunch of them at the honey be Expo you know and you just you got a thousand of them and you only needed 300 this year and 200 the next year now it's four years down the road and you're finally using the last bit they're prob not going to draw those very good comb can dry out dust and different things can get on it that's one of the problems with buying them loaded like this a free a preassembled frame loaded with a foundation is airs hitting this dust hits this and eventually that dries out and becomes brittle and it's not very attractive to the bees and sometimes they just won't use it at all and then you get all kinds of funny stuff so preferably if you don't have your foundation inserted into the frames leave it in the box with all the foundations close to each other but you can always recat them I actually reced this because I've had it sitting for about 3 years I had a good coat from premiere of double wax but I added another coat to it and I mean to tell you you can smell it from here it is awesome you can't but I certainly can it's a wonderful smell and this is very gummy and I don't fill plastic i f with my fingernails beeswax and those bees aren't ever going to fill any plastic either they're just going to draw this out really nice when you are trying to draw Combs after the honey flow that thick coat makes a big difference I love doing this having extra Combs is great and when the honey flow is over and I've got a colony this tall and I take funny funny Laurel and I take the honey supers off and now it's you know well down into here I have still this big be population for a little while because the queen has been churning all that brood out and has brood on the way from when things were really productive so the bees are going to naturally decline once the flow ends for me that's early June but I still have all this B power being created that was laid back in May and early June so with that Big B population I can use that if I hurry up and as soon as it flows over take all those Honeys supers off and then put some really well-coated foundations on there and I just pull up a frame of eggs or young larae into a box of deep foundations and I feed them and I feed them and I feed them and I get thousands of combs drawn this way and that way I never have a shortage of combs I actually have way too many combs and this is something that I hope you get to experience soon because even if you get to the point where you're like I only want five hives this all I want have some backup Combs just in case there's a swarm or there's this or there's that or you know hey you just want to make some more bees because you just get the bug I know terrible joke there's a lot to this I think we've covered a lot in this video but having extra Combs is important a good wax coat is important sourcing good stuff is important and if you're in the US support the US companies there's some stuff on Amazon that is done in the US a lot of these companies that I mentioned do sell on Amazon as well and other places so just be sure that you buy it from a reputable Place North American honeybee Expo thanks for watching this video hey we're doing a live chat if you made it all the way to the end of this video congratulations you are awesome hope you're having a good B season we are doing a live chat every first and third Saturdays at 700 p.m. central Time so bring your questions if you have something about drawing Combs or maybe you have something else be related or maybe not at all want to talk about how Alabama is not the best team in college football we'll listen to you we won't agree but we'll have a great time getting to hang out with you at the live chats first and third week of each month uh Saturday 700 p.m. central Time we'll see you there have a good one

Channel: Kamon Reynolds - Tennessee's Bees

Views: 56,504

Keywords: beekeeping, beekeeper, honeybees, bees, Kamon Reynolds, honey, How to install a package of bees, How to install a nuc, package vs nuc challenge, beehive, Package of bees, swarming, swarm, swarm control, queen cell, queen cup, swarm trapping, swarm trap, bee cast, comb honey production, comb honey production methods, honey extraction, how to draw comb, honey comb, how to use plastic foundation, how to get bees to draw wax foundation, plastic foundation, wax foundation

Id: Lw0opZu-DMY

Length: 22min 56sec (1376 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 21 2024