Oops! Weird comb photo attached!

[Maryly Snow]

Maryly

[Robin Chatham]

Yep, bees often don't like drawing wax off plastic foundation so they make those shapes.  They also make those shapes along the bottom of frames because there's no other space to draw the comb that they want.

My remedy.  I smoke bees off a couple tubes and smash and smear tubes onto surface of foundation, even if it has nectar in it. Bees rebuild it better 

On Mon, Jun 29, 2026, 6:20 PM Maryly Snow <mar...@snowstudios.com> wrote:

Maryly

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[Gerald Przybylski]

I concur with Robin about pressing down into the waffle pattern those ribs of comb drawn perpendicular to plastic frames or plastic foundation.
The bees will clean up the honey and move the wax onto the walls of the waffle pattern. 
If the wax has exoskeletons coating the walls, imo it should go into the wax melting operation.  

Advice to paint extra wax onto plastic foundation is widely distributed.  The vendors and manufactures don't mention it because they don't want to admit they don't put on enough wax. 
"Generous" is mentioned, but what constitutes generous? 

Here is one way to do it: 
• Put an inch or two of water into a pot, and add a couple of pounds of wax to the pot too.  The water is a safety precaution!! Water Boiling limits the max temperature. 
• Turn the heat on LOW.  You're aiming for the COVERED pot to go from cold to a slow simmer in 30 minutes to an hour.  Avoid violent boiling.
• Dip one of those (disposable)  quarter-inch thick by 2 inch wide bristle trim paintbrush into the wax long enough to get the business up to melting temperature of the wax.
• When the brush and wax are hot enough, use the brush to paint wax onto the plastic waffle pattern; work the brush back and forth to force the wax all the way into the divots. 
You're aiming for half-filling to completely filling the waffle pattern with wax which is mostly free of voids. 
It sounds potentially messy but it doesn't have to be.  Rest the edge of the frame on the rim of the pot while doing the 'painting.' 
The bees work the wax out of the divots into cell walls surrounding each divot. 
• when done coating foundation,  put a cover on the pot, and let it cool slowly.  The wax will solidify and shrink back from the pot. Easy to remove.
Look at the bottom of the puck.  Sometimes solids suspended in the wax settle into the space between the water and the wax.
Save the wax-loaded brush for next time. 
Is the water tinted yellow or tan?  The simmering extracted some of the color and ionic compounds from the wax. 

MAKE SURE YOU NEVER RUN OUT OF WATER IN THE BOTTOM OF THE POT.  Same for double-boiler heating method. 

If you have a really tall pot (10 inches or more) you can arrange to have the top of the molten wax layer 8-1/2 inches above the bottom of the pot. 
(the foundations are 17 inches wide.)
(an inch or so of wax on top of water works just fine. You don't have to have a pot filled with molten wax.) 
Once the bath is at or near boiling, you can dip the foundation briefly into the bath.  Wax will mostly fill the divots as you pull it out. 
Wax will solidify onto the cold foundation, but it'll be too hot to touch for a few minutes. 
So Dip one end. Let the foundation cool for a few minutes, then dip the other end. 
(obviously you ONLY dip the foundation - Not the whole frame the foundation is mounted in.  i.e. pop the foundation out of the frame  before dipping it)
If the foundation gets to hot, it will warp.  Don't dawdle. 
This method doesn't have to be messy either.  Wax doesn't generally drip from the dipped foundation. 
(To save time you can dip the ends of a foundation, and paint wax onto the middle) 

Estimating: 
It takes about One ounce to an ounce-and-a-half of wax to coat ONE side of a Medium foundation.  
A pound of wax per medium 10 frame box is a little on the skimpy side. 
(a pound of wax is about 8 pounds of honey equivalent) 

Visit Sal-Army or Good Will, and look there for pots you can dedicate to wax processing.  
Keep an eye open for a hot-plate too, so you can set up for dipping on the patio. The process will probably attract interested bees. 

If you method of honey harvesting honey on plastic foundations  is scrape-and-crush,  you probably already realized you need to add wax. 
Fortunately the method harvests a lot of wax. 

That's my 2¢

[Jim Veitch]

I bought a 120V induction single pot cooker. Temperature is adjustable and I set it to about 180 degrees for painting melted wax onto foundation.  It's also great for making Oxalic Acid strips where you don't want the glycerin/OA mixture to get too hot, so I set it to 170 which Randy Oliver recommends.   As a bonus on nice evenings we often plug it in and cook outside on the deck.

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[Maryly Snow]

I’ll double check but I don’t think the tubular combs were drawn off plastic foundation.

Maryly

On Jun 29, 2026, at 6:19 PM, Maryly Snow <mar...@snowstudios.com> wrote:

<IMG_7844.jpeg>

Maryly

[Maryly Snow]

Tubular combs are hanging off the bottom of each frame.

Maryly

On Jun 29, 2026, at 6:19 PM, Maryly Snow <mar...@snowstudios.com> wrote:

<IMG_7844.jpeg>

Maryly

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[MLuskin]

How do you know they are not queen cells?

Merry Luskin, Oakland CA 

Reference librarian 

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[Danny Williamson]

Hello Maryly, If the comb is attached to the bottom of the brood frames it's drone cells. Look at the cell size difference compared to worker cells on the brood frame itself. It's not an uncommon thing to happen when bees utilize the space between the bottom of the frame and the bottom board to make drone cells. Just scrape it off like you did and put the frames back. 

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[Gerald Przybylski]

Oh. 

For beeks who use all small-cell plastic foundation (5.2mm?),  the bees put drone cells between boxes. The fix is giving them a foundationless frames per brood box. 

When hives get plugged out with food (honey and pollen and brood) they build comb in the space below frames in the bottom brood box, and between the top box and inner cover and even above the inner cover! 

If the hive has a lot of undrawn plastic foundation, and the colony hates to draw cells on plastic, they'll hang it from under bottom bars because it's a little easier. Personality counts.

So my suggestion is
• check the brood boxes for frames full of or mostly full of pollen.  If pollen only, move them out; dispose of the pollen.  If pollen and capped honey, harvest the honey and dispose of the pollen.
My rule of thumb is at most One pollen frame per brood box in our climate where the bees can bring in new pollen all year long. They prefer new pollen. They'll never use the old stuff. 
• From January through july, lean toward moving honey frames out of the brood boxes up into the honey supers. 
The queen needs space to lay eggs in. They won't feel the urge to make cells under the bottom bars of frames in the bottom box when they have enough space above. 
• If the bees aren't drawing out your plastic foundation, coat it with extra wax.  An ounce or two per side per medium foundation puts enough in the divots for the bees to work with. 
The cost for the bees is substantially reduced because that wax represents a lot of nectar. 



that's my 2¢

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[Robin Chatham]

The thickness of the plug indicates that much space between bottom rail of frame and bottom board 

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[Danny Williamson]

Hey Robin, yeah that's what I noticed too. It looks like the same spacing of comb like what I get sometimes on the bottom of my frames. So what I do is add another deep or medium super so it gives them more room and then they will build alot less of the drone brood on the bottom of the frames and more on the frame itself. But again I've had some bees that will put drone brood on the bottoms of the frames anyways especially during swarm season. 

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