# Staying SC?



## Solomon Parker (Dec 21, 2002)

If you put foundationless in this time of year, what you will have officially is drone comb.

The idea of small cell is to return the bees to a more natural size brood comb. Beyond that, the details are not as important. If you put your bees on anything other than small cell, you won't have precisely 4.9mm or 4.95mm in the case of Mann Lake frames. Natural size is dependent on location and lies somewhere between 4.6 to 5.2mm.

The only reason to differentiate is if your're trying to sell something branded a certain way.


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## Duranthas (Mar 17, 2012)

Gotcha. The reason I'm asking is that next year I plan on doing splits by taking frames of brood and placing them in the new hive and replacing the frames I robbed with foundationless. I was just curious if the bees would stay small cell on the foundationless or if I should replace the robbed frames with more PF-125.


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## Solomon Parker (Dec 21, 2002)

The best results I have had with foundationless is single frames between frames of drawn comb with brood in it. Your climate is nearly identical to mine and I can tell you with certainty that right now they are drawing drone. I saw it yesterday.

Foundationless brood comb is drawn between 4.9-5.2mm here. You'll have to discover what your native size is. But 'small cell' is 4.9mm. Chances are about 0% that you will get whole frames of 4.9mm cells. That's just the nature of foundationless.


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## Specialkayme (Sep 4, 2005)

I havn't noticed a correlation between what type of comb bees draw out on foundationless (drone or worker) and time of year. Could just be me though.

I have noticed a correlation between what type of comb bees draw out on foundationless (drone or worker) and what they already have in the hive. If they already have one or two frames out of ten that are drone comb, there is little desire to make a third or a fourth, regardless of the time of year.


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## camero7 (Sep 21, 2009)

Been using ML PF-100's for a while with some foundationless sprinkled in. Bees never draw out totally small cell on foundationless. The center of the brood frames will be pretty close to small cell. Outside edges will be much larger. Foundationless frames in the supers will always be 5.2 - 5.5 in my experience.


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## Duranthas (Mar 17, 2012)

I didn't expect the entire foundationless frame to be small cell considering that the bees don't lay (at least not that I know of but I'm noob...) the entire frame as worker brood. I thought there would be a band across the top of honey and pollen which if the bees could draw out themselves it would not be small cell. My concern is that when they draw the middle out for worker brood then would it be small cell or would it be larger thereby negating my PF-125 regress efforts.
On a side note, when brood emerges is that about as big as they are going to get or do they continue to grow some? I ask this because the brood that has emerged off my PF-125 frames is much much smaller than what came with the package.


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## wadehump (Sep 30, 2007)

They will draw what they need not what you want.:thumbsup:


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## whiskers (Aug 28, 2011)

Duranthas-
I believe that once the exoskeleton of an insect hardens it cannot grow further, thus insects that do partial metamorphous like locusts and grasshoppers have to moult their exoskeletons in order to grow.
Bill


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## Solomon Parker (Dec 21, 2002)

The band of honey across the top of a frame is the fault of the frame restricting uninterrupted comb area. On foundationed frames, the comb is the same size as the foundation. On foundationless, they draw what they need at the time of construction so there's no telling what size will be where. In my experience, they often start with worker comb and then transition to drone later on down. But it happens the other way as well.


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## rweakley (Jul 2, 2004)

I say for the most part don't worry about it. Place foundationless frames between the pf-100s and let them draw it out. If it's drone or honey comb move it to the outside edges of the hive and put another empty in the middle. Perfect frames probably only exist in plastic so, just let them do their thing and place the best drawn foundationless in the middle of the brood nest going forward. Worst case you can always pull those honey/drone frames when full of honey, crush and strain and put it back in and let them try again. You get honey and wax, how can you beat that?


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## cdevier (Jul 17, 2010)

I agree with Rod. The bees in my observation hive mostly make worker comb on the Mann Lake pf-120 frames. Then they make several larger sized cells up to drone comb on the edges and in open spots between frames. However since April 1, they have not raised any drones (not even one drone in my hive)- they backfill all of the larger cells with nector and keep the queen out of them.


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