Here is a sample of the Introduction of this e-book to give you a sense of where I'm going with this material. Order information is at the end, or *click here*
Or if you just want to jump to the summation of my findings, you can *click here*
Today’s Issue of Plastic Foundation
The shift from wood/wax to plastic is all about convenience and saving time and labor. Ask anyone who has spent an evening assembling wood frames, tying wires, inserting wax foundation, then embedding the wires. While it’s not particularly back-breaking work, it is tedious and time consuming.
Wax foundation cannot be shipped when the weather is cold because the cold makes the wax extremely brittle and fragile. However, my best time to assemble wood/wax frames is in the winter so I need to make sure I’ve got enough wax foundation on hand before winter sets in. My biggest complaint about assembling these frames is how time consuming it is.
Plastic foundation is all about making my life easier as a beekeeper. Unfortunately, the bees don’t seem to see it that way! If given a choice, the bees will always choose frames with wax foundation over frames with plastic foundation (although the bees seem to favor wood frames with plastic foundation over the all-in-one plastic frame/foundation).
A Caveat About Plastic Foundation
However, given the bees’ preference for the naturalness of wax and the beekeepers’ affinity for the convenience of plastic, I cannot emphasize enough that plastic foundation cannot be managed in the same way as wax foundation. I’ve heard from a lot of beekeepers who said they placed a super or brood box of plastic foundation on top of their hive and the bees totally ignored it. And I don’t question that statement one bit. It’s happened to me.
Or perhaps you know the beekeeper who put frames of both wax and plastic foundation in the same hive body and the bees worked the wax and ignored the plastic. Yep, I’ve done that too.
Others have told me they put plastic frames/foundation in the brood box and the bees refused to draw out those new frames. Upon further inspection, they said they found swarm cells. Then they blamed the plastic foundation on causing the colony to swarm! And to add insult to injury, a swarmed colony has a reduced workforce and it will not draw out plastic foundation.
Plastic foundation is not for the timid beekeeper or the lazy “bee-haver” (to borrow moniker from the late, George Imirie, 1923-2007). To make plastic work, you have to be involved with your bees. Plastic foundation requires better management than wax foundation, but I also believe that the extra management is not beyond the average person’s grasp. I think there are more lazy beekeepers than ignorant beekeepers out there in the world. Don’t let someone else’s failure intimidate you. Plastic foundation can, and does, work. But you’re going to have to work at it.
For all the complaints about how plastic foundation doesn’t work, there are a host of beekeepers who wouldn’t go back to wax foundation for the honey in China. But let me warn you, you can’t approach plastic foundation in the same manner as wax foundation. So how do you approach plastic foundation to gain the bees’ confidence that plastic will work? That’s what this manuscript is all about.
