From personal experience - not conjecture - I can assure you that if the
bees strip the wax off one patch or one side or one whole sheet of Duragilt
they will never in a million years rebuild the comb CORRECTLY on that frame
UNTIL you replace the foundation. This is due to the fact that the midrib
in Duragilt is just a shiny sheet of plastic with no cell imprint in it.
In 9 frame units (10 frame boxes) the bees will build comb that is one bee
space off the midrib if they have taken the wax off the midrib. If
Duragilt is given only during a flow or while feeding the bees very little
if any of this wax stripping will occur and you will get good comb. When
the bees are unable to draw comb because no nectar is coming in then they
mine the wax off comb not in use and use it where they need it for cappings
and repair work.
With Pierco the cell imprint is in the plastic midrib - they sell unwaxed
Pierco as well as waxed (not every bee supply house lists the unwaxed but
it is available). The bees draw the unwaxed just dandy. They also will
redraw entire frames if you scrape them down. The bees readily work
Pierco frames and the queens do indeed love to lay in them. Nothing is
perfect but we like Pierco frames well enough to be gradually switching
over to them.
We will always have to maintain some old wood and wax frames due to HYG
testing. That is unless someone can come up with a accurate HYG test that
does not involved cutting out samples of brood - possibly freezing them on
the comb as Dr. Spivak has done (but so far it takes 30 minutes which is
not fast enough to be truly practical in the field). Please don't come
back with the Pin Prick method - it is a dead giveaway that there is a
problem when haemolymph is exposed and you have to check back in 6 hours if
you stand any chance of finding highly HYG colonies using the Pin Prick
method.
Jack Griffes
Country Jack's Honeybee Farm
Horseshoeing by Jack Griffes
Ottawa Lake, MI 49267
USA
e-mail [log in to unmask]
Web page http://www2.netcom.com/~griffes/
