Bees making a mess of plastic foundation,. suggestions?

[DBoire]

Situation:
installed 3 Medium NUC's in 10 frame Medium Boxes. Plan on running 3 mediums for brood boxes.
Added 1 Medium box with 10 old plastic foundation that I had scrapped off the comb, comb was over 7 years old and dry and falling apart.
Bees are built comb across the plastic from frame to frame.

Cleaned this up on the first inspection and tried again, bees continued with the building comb across the plastic from frame to frame. At this point I don't want to remove this cross comb as they don't have a lot of open drawn comb. But I thinking they need to draw out at least a second medium box of foundation soon.

I think I'm going to remove the frames of plastic foundation that they are not building on in the second box and replace it with wooden frames and wax foundation and cull out the remaining plastic foundation that has cross comb as they vacate it.

Any thoughts?
Thanks.
D

[cao]

I have tried some plastic foundation the last couple of years.  Last year they didn't want to draw it out.  I painted extra wax to them this year and they are drawing them out great this year.  Most of the wax coated foundation doesn't have enough wax on them for the bees liking.  Maybe when you scraped the comb off, You took to much of the wax off of the plastic.  If there isn't enough wax, I think the bees see the foundation as a wall rather than comb.

[Michael Bush]

If only you had used foundationless ;)

I scrape the fins and parallel combs off down to the plastic.

[DBoire]

Thanks for the thoughts, just hoping that they can get enough comb drawn and stores for the winter.

[BeeMaster2]

I just reused several hundred plastic frames. I cleaned them with a pressure washer and painted them with melted wax. The bees really like having fresh wax on them. I did have problems with a couple of them not being used but when I inspected them, I found that they were ones that I did not wax.
Jim

[Joe D]

First foundation I ever bought was some waxed plastic.  I had a couple of hives that would not draw on them.  I took them out and added more wax, one hive did but didn't want to draw on it the other never did.  It still has not drawn any plastic.  They will do foundationless, and after they connect it fairly good you can extract it in an extractor.

Good luck to you and your bees


Joe D

[Jim134]

I just reused several hundred plastic frames. I cleaned them with a pressure washer and painted them with melted wax. The bees really like having fresh wax on them. I did have problems with a couple of them not being used but when I inspected them, I found that they were ones that I did not wax.
Jim

      I did have a few thousand plastic frames that were used. Scrape the wax off the best I can and saved it. Put the Wax in a solar wax melter. Washed off the plastic foundation with a HOT pressure washer. As long as the plastic does not get over a 150F it will not get a memory. Repainted the plastic Foundation with a thick coat of beeswax. The first few hundred have work fine. IMO the new plastic Foundation from the factory are not nearly covered enough with beeswax.


                     BEE HAPPY Jim 134 :)

[BeeMaster2]

Jim,
I agree about the amount of wax on the plastic from the factory but it depends on who made them.
I bought mine from Mann Lake and the only ones that I have had problems with were ones that were in the hive un used after the flow. Then the bees remove the wax to use in the hive instead of building on it.
Jim