After hanging out at Doug’s house and working with his bees, Katie and I came home and were inspired to prepare more for our bees.

The frames that go inside the hive have to have something called “foundation” in them, which is some material, usually wax, with hexagon-shaped imprints on it, that the bees then draw out into their honeycomb, in which they lay eggs and store pollen and nectar.

Katie and I have read about natural ways to keep bees that can avoid using antibiotics and chemical treatments against mites and diseases, and one of those is using “natural cell” honeycomb, which means you let the bee build the honeycomb themselves by just giving them a small “starter strip” of foundation inside the frame.

To accomplish this, I melted some wax we bought inside a double boiler that Katie obtained (just two cheap pots from the grocery store), then, after pouring really hot melted wax on my hands accidentally, I dribbled the wax in the groove of each frame where we had put a “starter strip” of foundation.

Here is the double boiler with water in the lower pot and hard wax in the upper one:

The box contains plugs of wax, then we used the pizza cutter to cut the foundation into 1 inch strips.  Finally, the two odd-looking pieces (one metal, one black wood) form a wax-tube fastener, a device which is supposed to let you dribble the wax into the groove of the frame without burning yourself with melted wax, but which didn’t work for me:

Here is an empty frame with no foundation in it.  Eight of these fit in a row inside each super (aka the hive box):

Here are the frames with the starter strips in them and the line of yellow wax gluing them in:

Outside, I set up the 5 supers on the hive stand and put the top on them.  i put cinder blocks and wood beams to form the base.

Close up:

Side view

Other side.  Note how the entrance faces the tall fence, which makes the bees fly up and over everything: