As we learn how to keep bees, advice from more experienced beekeepers is invaluable. Luckily, beekeepers are usually generous with sharing their experience. Perhaps the solitude of long hours of working bees makes us eager for human interaction. Whether in person, in print, or online, there’s a tsunami of beekeeping information available.
At the start of my second year, I had a very experienced beekeeper as a mentor. He was tolerant of my wackier notions about bee husbandry, patient with my newbie’s clumsiness, bemused by my (re)invention of long-known beekeeping practices. (“Nancy, those spacer-panels you thought up are called follower boards.”) But the one thing he was insistent about was pushing the frames back together.
Not just pushed together, but firmly levered back into very tight contact with each other, in every box, every time. At first, I thought he was just being super-picky. Despite being a large man, he handles frames with the delicate, deft touch of a brain surgeon. But once every frame is back in its box, there is one last step he taught me: use a hive tool to force the end bars of the frames tightly together.
Most beekeepers in the world today use a hive designed in the 1850s by a minister from Philadelphia, the Reverend Lorenzo Langstroth. Although other beekeepers before him had noticed that bees almost invariably keep a constant dimension of open space between their combs, Langstroth’s design took the idea one step further when he invented the removable frame hive. That revolutionized beekeeping forever, making it easier for beekeepers and far safer for the bees.
Although most of us are using Langstroth equipment, we may be overlooking the central point of it: removable frames only work well when they are straight, flat, and even. To keep the bees from freelancing away this critical benefit, the frames must be carefully spaced so that the bees have no other choice except to create, and maintain, them exactly as intended. And to do that, the end bars must be pushed back together after all frames are replaced. Even small gaps between the frames will begin to weaken the discipline imposed on the bees by the fixed space.
Snugging up the frames
To maintain a hive in the best condition, both easy to work and protective of the bees, occasionally scrape off the build-up of propolis on the end bars, and always finish up by snugging up the frames against one another with your hive tool.
This one trivial-seeming detail will provide a large benefit to your bees, offering both protection during inspections and conserving their time and energy. And it will save you hours of tedious remedial work to fix up comb that has run amuck.
That makes it the best piece of beekeeping advice I ever received. And now you have it, too.
