> That seems odd to me.  What sort of 'beekeepers' were they?

Agreed! Can't imagine any beginning beekeeper who doesn't learn the
hard way about what happens when you leave a frame out, and the bees
build volunteer combs from the lid.

Same here. My second hive of bees was a "cut out", taken from a sandstone cave. (My first was a swarm, dumped into a frame hive.) That was 35 years ago. 

This spring I obtained a hive in a frame-less box. Ironically, it was one of Tom Seeley's swarm catchers, left over from the days when he was studying the exact size cavity to attract swarms. Turns out the correct size is the size of a deep langstroth super. That's about 20 x 16 x 10 inches.

So here was this box with a colony in it. I thought I would just throw a super on it and let them work up. But lo and behold, the hive was nailed to the wall with the "bottom" pointing to the wall. This would have still been OK if the bees had made the combs parallel to the walls of the hive. But they didn't.

When I opened it up I was face to face with one 15 x 19 inch comb. It went like that from to back, some of the biggest and most perfect combs I ever saw. But the question was, how to salvage them by cutting them into 8 x 16 inch pieces. I thought about it for two weeks until I had worked out a plan involving the least amount of cutting. 

I managed to get 9 frames of comb, some perfect 8 x 16 inch pieces. I grew the hive into two stories and I am in the process of requeening it with a queen provided by Tom Glenn.

Anyone who hasn't done a cutout has missed an important beekeeping lesson. Sort of like driving around, never having learn how to use a stick shift.

Peter Borst

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