>>I have recently taken to letting the bees build their own comb in frames but without foundation.

Do you, or anyone else, have a good system for producing good combs in this approach?

I'd like to do the same but still have not worked out one detail.  Namely, when bees are introduced to a nest space (hive), they *measure* its shape and then start their honey combs with a certain cells size.  The first combs, that will be the *center combs*, will often have a smaller cell size as the queen will lay in them right away.  The upper top portions of the adjacent combs will often have huge cells that are very deep as well.  One will observe cell size reduction as one goes down.  

I think this is ideal and for the bees.  I would like to have the bees draw out their frame combs in a 3-deep hive with the vertical cell size reduction seen in the wild.  I would not interchange the frames on the bees once they are drawn out.  My problem is that, to draw out straight combs one needs to give the bees one deep at a time... so they initially think they only have a single deep nest for the cell reduction...

Any clever suggestion or ideas?  I guess if the bottom deep is drawn out with a cell size gradation then the added upper deeps will have larger storage cells...  I'll have to attempt this next year...

Waldemar
 

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