Robin Dartington said:

> Almost all foundation here is beeswax, if wired then
> bought prewired.

Well, someone sure is buying a lot of plastic foundation
in the UK.  The Pierco distributor for the UK says that
sales have been good, despite the last 2 years of poor
honey crops in the UK.  The distributor also talks about
"container loads" (meaning a multi-mode container of the
type that goes on a ship, train, or truck), which hold a
very large number of sheets of foundation.

> [imbedding wax foundation into the wires] Certainly sounds
> difficult. It was an old American habit I believe.

The original question came from a novice who uses the larger
langstroth-sized frames, and while UK-sized frames may be small
enough to not need cross-wiring in some cases, US frames are
large enough that they simply would not withstand extraction
even at low speeds.

Frames of pre-wired foundation without cross-wiring of some sort
are "extractor hand-grenades", weapons of mass destruction nearly
as messy as the recently-discovered Iraqi "Honey Nut Cluster Bombs".
http://www.bee-quick.com/bee-quick/flood/honeynut.jpg

> Quite a few beekeepers here produce honey as cut comb,
> using thin unwired wax foundation.

Clearly, comb honey is a special case, and is a non-sequitur
in a discussion about wiring frames versus plastic foundation.

> Wouldn't like to eat American cut comb, with a sheet of
> plastic down the middle.

Cute.

> But what a dumb way to do it...

Much less cute.

> ...You just cut out the whole comb , wires and all, and refit another
> wired sheet.

As more UK beekeepers give up the time-consuming practice of suspending
their comb horizontally to "drip" and get extractors, including the newer
"parallel radial" extractors, they will find that the newer techniques for
cross-wiring frames ("zig zag wiring", stapled into the frames with hoop
staples, which is much faster than traditional "cross wiring"), are a very
good idea, even when using pre-wired foundation, if one wants to preserve
and reuse one's drawn comb for future harvests.

The point to all this is that what may be possible to get away with when
using the smaller UK sized frames and/or when not extracting at all is not
a basis for advising a novice in North America, where things are bigger,
and things spin that much faster.


                        jim (who is supering with wild abandon this week)

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