BCKRVUE: DOING IT RIGHT THE FIRST TIME - WITH RITE CELL FOUNDATIONS

Saturday, March 1, 2014

DOING IT RIGHT THE FIRST TIME - WITH RITE CELL FOUNDATIONS

Another winter storm rolled through this weekend and now is the time to get busy putting together frame for the five new hives for the Becker Has Hives Host Program.

The hives are built and have to bee painted, yet.

This year I've committed to making the switch to Mann Lake's Rite-Cell Natural foundations. The plastic core foundation with the cell structure embedded into the plastic. It requires no pinning or reinforcement of any kind and can be easily inserted into an assembled frame with grooved top and bottom bars. The cell structure is deeper than other cell embedded plastic foundations leading to less drone comb.

The cells of our foundation are more defined and textured, which we have found to be more appealing to the bees. The cell structure is in the wax only and not in the plastic. If the wax gets damaged or chewed down, the bees are not likely to draw out the smooth plastic core. Pure wax foundations require time-consuming reinforcement and are prone to wax moth damage and chew down by the bees. With Rite-Cell, if wax moths enter and damages the hive, one would only need to scrape off the damage and reinsert the frames into the hive.

Some assembly required...

Glue all ends.

Assemble and tack in place.

One down and 119 to go.

That's about 500 more glued ends and tacks.

Its a start but I've still got a way to go

Jinga...

Well, I'm about half way done. And, I'll finish up on Sunday.

Here's an update hives all primed and ready to paint the next warm day.

http://bckrvue.blogspot.com/2014/01/becker-has-hivesfor-rent.html

Now, back to the original post!