Natural Sized Comb

 After reading Michael Bush's The Practical Beekeeper, and thinking about what working methods made sense to me, I really got into the idea of using foundationless frames, 8 frame medium supers for all hive parts, and committing to not treating. This was all pipe dream for the day I might run an apiary or keep more than two top bar hives. Maybe I'd work out deals and manage hives at an orchard or community garden.

Well all that is starting to come to a head, Sarah and I have worked out an agreement to locate hives at one, maybe two community gardens in the area. I'm keeping the details close for now, because I haven't explicitly asked if they are okay with it.

Now, what in the hell does this have to do with size of honeycomb cells? Sarah and I have slightly different opinions on a few things, she learned with foundation and is used to that. I'm a bit of a nut and don't (yet?) fully understand how poorly (or amazing!) the bees may choose to build in foundationless frames. By adding drawn frames from a nuc, I think they will be off to a great start, and I think the girls will be happier drawing their own wax. Plus I can ensure clean wax, and use it for cosmetic uses without the fear of chemical contaminants. I settles on sharing hives with foundation, if we could get small cell foundation. Mostly I want cute tiny bees, but there is also an ancillary benefit of smaller mite counts.

This led me to wonder, if the foundation we are installing has 4.9mm cells, how big are the cells on my self-drawn comb in the top bar hive? While they are larger bees from a package, they will build slightly smaller, as I understand it left to their own devices. Over time this will lead to fully regressed (in size) bees, provided the comb is removed so the slightly smaller bees can build even slightly smaller comb. 

Balancing act. I've got one end of the bar precariously balanced on the hive to free a hand to hold the ruler up to some cells. Out of the top bar hive I had 10 cells equaling 2 inches, .2 inches per cell converted to millimeters equals 5.08mm cells. Not bad, well within the 4.9-5.2 range that Bush quotes from beekeepers in the 19th century. But a bit away from the 4.9mm small cell foundation we'll start our other bees on.

 This is a piece of comb cut out of the attic of the hive that is housing the swarm we saved a few weeks ago. They are building at 5.3mm per cell.

 And here is a huge chunk of pollen comb from the same, I couldn't find a good average of ten similarly sized cells in a straight enough line to measure but here it is.

And here is a piece showing a bunch of uncapped and capped drone brood. Sorry little buggers.