>Wood frames, after a season or two,  space  the frames a touch wider than
>when new, due to propolis builup.  Pierco has thin contact areas to ensure
>tight fit -- if the frames are crowded with a hive tool -- so this
>widening effect will not likely ocur, making the tolerances more
>important?  Maybe Murray will comment.
>
I would agree fully with this. The spacing is definitely just a little
bit narrower than the normal USA/Canada wooden frame, even when these
are new, although it is very close to British normal. This does make the
situation significantly more sensitive to defects in the spacing, hence
our experience of bald patches in some cases and brace comb elsewhere.
 
Like Allen, our wooden frames with wire and wax are not always flat and
indeed we have some combs which we should be ashamed of. We now operate
an annual cull, but there are always quite a few (well, OK, a lot) slip
through, and should be picked up next year. We had hoped Piercos would
be the answer to this as they would be perfectly flat, and culling the
bad ones would just have been a scrape off and return to hive situation
done with the hive tool on site. Alas it is not that simple.
 
All current new boxes we are setting up are North American wooden frames
with Plasticell or similar foundation. We like it but thought Piercos
would save the assembly work. If they can sort out this bowing/warping
problem it probably still will. I note that Allen uses Permadent rather
than Plasticell. My thinking on using the latter is that the bees draw
less drone on it, and controlling the amount of drone brood is part of
our strategy for living with varroa. (Hence the comb culling, something
we did not greatly bother with before.) I also had a feeling that it
would be more rigid and thus warp less in extracting than Permadent,
which I must add that I have never used. We have had quite a bit of
Plasticell in service in Illinois depth honey supers for some years, and
it is as tough as old boots, never budging during even the tangential
extracting we have to use for heather honey, and you just attack it with
the hive tool if you need to scrape anything off. When we did that with
Piercos they often put drone back in place, but with the extended side
walls in Plasticell this almost never occurs.
 
I have decided to give the more modern Piercos of the last couple of
seasons another chance this coming year, however, but Allens experience,
together with that of another Canadian I have heard of this year,
suffering (albeit slightly) from a problem I had been led to believe was
cured, makes me a little reluctant to splash out in too much haste.
Unlike most people on this list, I would have some problem returning
defectives from Scotland.
 
Hope this helps,
 
Murray
 
ps. Allen, they never do flatten, and possibly get a little worse.
 
 
--
Murray McGregor
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