Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Manley frames
Manley Frames have straight sides, which keep them wider apart all the way down. This
encourages the bees to draw out the wax comb further so they can store more honey.
These are the frames to use for the honey supers. Because they are wider you would
probably use only eight or, at most, nine of them in the box. When you come to extract
the honey, the frame's straight sides make it easy for you to slide your uncapping knife
along the frame, thus cutting off the wax cappings evenly. Try to use these frames.
Other frames
Many appliance manufacturers provide thin-sided frames that need spacers to keep
them apart from other frames. When I started beekeeping using British National-
sized frames, small metal add-ons called 'metal ends' were used. These quickly became
clogged up with propolis and were dreadful things. Later they were made of plastic, and
so they were then known as 'plastic metal ends'!
When holding a frame and looking at a fine queen, for example, you instinctively hold
the frame by these devices, which suddenly give way and fall off, causing you to drop
the frame and so to lose the queen. In Europe, other plastic slide-on pieces abound, and
none of these devices is as good as the Hoffman spaced frame for the brood box and the
Manley spaced frame for the honey boxes. My advice is definitely to use these frames if
you can, or swap over to them when you can. You will be surprised at just how critical
the design of these cheap hive items is in your beekeeping - you will curse nothing as
much as a badly designed frame.
One other method of spacing frames is via a castellated ridge at each end of the box
along the ridge from where the frames hang. These ridges work but they limit your
choices of bee management and frame use in the box and, to me, are annoying. My
advice is to avoid them if possible.
Feeders
Frame feeders, (see Figure 10) are plastic frames with sides and an open top. They are
used to feed your bees with sugar syrup, when required. To do this you simply remove
the outer frame in the brood box and replace it with a frame feeder (see Figure 11). You
then fill the feeder with sugar syrup, remembering to place some material in the feeder,
