>The foundation surface of the PF100s tends to be bowed to one side, which 
>is annoying and does not allow the use of 10 combs in the brood nest.  The 
>cells on one side will be too shallow for proper brood rearing. That is, unless 
>you face all of the bowed surfaces in the same direction. 

Interesting.  I have heard this said before, and we have discussed the 
warping inherant in Pierco frames here before, but have not personally 
observed problems with brood being raised in them very often.  Maybe 
I'm just not observant?  On occasion, I have seen one or another of 
two facing combs -- not necessarily with either being plastic 
one-piece -- with shallow cells and no brood, due to bad spacing, but 
most of the time, I don't see it. Most often when I see it, it is from frames 
with broken shoulders crowding a neighbour or frames otherwise crowded
closer than intended.

That makes me wonder: how critical is the depth of a capped worker 
cell and how much tolerance is there in this dimension?  If two combs 
are close together, do the bees make shallower worker cells unless 
there is simply too little room and then only raise brood on one of the
two combs?  Do they leave a smaller bee space between the combs?  

If the cells are shallower, are the resulting bees deformed in any 
way?  I did some looking through my books, but this does not seem 
to have been addresssed in what I have on hand.

I know some beekeepers actually shave their Hoffman frame shoulders 
to fit eleven frames into a standard box, so it would seem that there
is quite a bit of wiggle room in the 'normal' ten-frame spacing.

>If you lay a straightedge across one of these, undrawn, you will 
>probably see that the distance from the straightedge to the foundation 
>surface is quite different from one side to the other ..I have also 
>seen this quite a bit with the Pierco deeps. It is not a noticeable 
>problem with PF120s, due to the shorter, ~ 6" span.

Are the PF120s not also different in the size of cells?

>My own bees made a mess of some of the PF100s on the first 
>attempt, with lots of drone and strange transition cells, but after 
>I scraped down the errant sections of comb and rewaxed with 
>a roller, they have done better on the second try!

That is interesting in that when I reported that the bees had 
drawn the 5.0 mm comb well as the Permadent, I was typically
looking at solid frames of honey and I did think I may have noticed 
some larger cells in the corner areas of some, but the combs were 
capped and the capping were flat, so I assumed that I was 
imagining it and made a note to look further later.

The open 5.0 drawn comb I saw where brood was raised looks to be 
pretty well all worker size.

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