# Year-old hives continuing to avoid working the plastic small cell frames



## gunter62 (Feb 13, 2011)

I prefer to keep all undrawn frames the same in each box. Once everything is drawn, I may pull a frame and plug in an unmatched frame. Given a choice, bees seem to prefer foundationless. Without a choice, they have drawn my Mann Lake frames just fine.


----------



## Riverratbees (Feb 10, 2010)

I have never had any luck with those types of frames myself.


----------



## beecron (Nov 7, 2004)

Riverratbees said:


> I have never had any luck with those types of frames myself.


I agree...the only plastic frames I have now are in the supers to give some better support during extraction. I found pretty quickly that many bees don't tend to draw the plastic very quickly.


----------



## Ramona (Apr 26, 2008)

We use a lot of Mann lake pf 100's and the bees do a great job drawing them out.

We start out new packages on them. We also do a lot of foundationless but only introduce when the bees are well on their way to being fully regressed.

Have experienced great reluctance by the bees to use brand new honey super cell but never had this issue with the Mann lake pf 100's.

Have put about 50 packages on over the past three years with great results.

Ramona


----------



## catbackr (Jun 5, 2010)

I bought two packages of "4.9" bees from Wolf Creek last year and put them on small cell foundation from Kelly's. I found they wouldn't draw that out either. They did draw some foundationless frames but it sure wasn't 4.9. I finally gave up and put in some rite-cell from Mann Lake.


----------



## KQ6AR (May 13, 2008)

We don't have any trouble with the mann lake pf frames. As someone else mentioned we don't mix them until they're drawn.


----------

