It’s All About the Wax

 Honeycomb 

Honeycomb or comb—with its signature hexagons — is the beeswax structure that makes up the heart and skeleton of a honeybee colony. The hexagon shape itself is a marvel of natural engineering—it is the most efficient shape available. The six matching and touching sides of each cell use the least amount of material to create, while at the same time producing a very strong structure—and the hexagons fit together perfectly, leaving no wasted space between. 

Comb is created by the bees and made from beeswax. Tiny white ovals of beeswax are secreted from the wax glands in a young honeybee’s abdomen and shaped by the bees into sheets or panels of interconnected hexagons. 

All of the natural processes of the hive—everything that bees do—happens in or on their comb. Bees raise their young (known as brood) in brood comb cells; they store their food in honeycomb cells, and they arrange the combs inside their hive according to the needs of the colony. Comb is intrinsic to the honeybees’ existence. 

Honeybees are known as cavity nesters, meaning they build their nests, consisting of multiple sheets or panels of comb, inside a sheltering space, or cavity. The cavity might be a hollow tree or branch, a hollow space in a cliff, a space inside the walls of a building, the interior of a beehive or other similar cavity.

 The bees create the comb and situate it throughout the hive according to their needs—the raising of female worker bees (which requires a specifically sized cell), the raising of male drone bees (requiring a differently sized cell) and the storage of the pollen and honey that make up their supply of food. 

A natural beehive filled with natural beeswax honeycomb should invoke wonder at the magic at work there. If you accept that honeybees have existed on earth for 65,000,000 years, give or take a few millennia, then it would seem that we owe a certain amount of respect to these industrious creatures and their innate knowledge of what they need. The natural systems at work inside a hive should be protected, not thwarted.

Frames 

In the 1850s the Reverend L. L. Langstroth applied for and received a patent for what we in the US now consider the typical square-box, conventional beehive. Langstroth’s hive utilized Hoffman frames — self-spacing frames which help to maintain bee space between the combs and can easily be removed from the hive. 

Bee space is the amount of space required for the bees to walk between their combs. Langstroth capitalized on the realization that if a hive and frames were constructed so that the space between the frames was a consistent ⅜ of an inch, then the bees were less likely to fill that space with burr comb (irregular comb not built within the frames) or try to fill it in completely with propolis (the strong, glue- like substance made by the bees from the resins of trees). The bees’ ability and tendency to seal gaps in their hive with burr comb and propolis can be frustrating for the beekeeper, since it requires a great deal of work to keep the parts of the hive free and movable. 

So in some ways, frames simplified life for the beekeeper. A movable comb hive allows for the early discovery of pests, diseases or queen problems, as the individual frames of comb can be removed and viewed. This type of hive also permits the removal of the frames of honeycomb for the extraction of the honey and subsequent return of the comb to the hive. 

Since the frames provide a supporting structure around the comb, less caution is required when inspecting or working the hive. Frames can be handled fairly unceremoniously—beekeepers often set them on the ground, bump them against things (including each other) and lean them against the hive — and the comb supported inside a frame can withstand this sort of treatment. 

In other ways, the use of frames complicated things for the beekeeper, as frames are time-consuming and laborious to put together, and their assembly occupies many a beekeeper during the winter months in anticipation of beekeeping season. So frames in and of themselves are not necessarily detrimental to bees... and in fact they’re sort of handy for beekeepers.

Foundation 

Foundation is a sheet of wax or plastic with the outlines of hexagons embossed on its surface. The bees then draw their honeycomb based on this outline. Some foundation, known as fully drawn foundation, has the hexagonal cells completely constructed (drawn out). Foundation is meant to serve as a guide for the bees’ honeycomb — that special, natural structure so essential to the workings of the bee colony. Why? Don’t the bees know how to make their own honeycomb? Haven’t they been doing just that for millions of years? Good question. Here’s part of the story.

Straight Comb 

When beekeepers go to inspect their hives, it quickly becomes obvious that the comb needs to be straight so that it can be removed easily from the hive, inspected and then reinserted. So one reason for the development of foundation was to enforce the building of straight comb, contained within the frames of a conventional hive.

Head Start 

Another intent behind foundation, and especially fully drawn foundation, is to offer the bees what is considered to be a head start—it provides cells which can be filled with brood or honey immediately. The need for straight comb and the attempt to provide the bees with a head start were two beneficial driving factors behind the invention and use of foundation. Foundation was never intended to be harmful to bees. No beekeeper begins with that in mind! In fact, the combination of movable frames and foundation went a long way toward savings entire hives of bees from being destroyed in order to harvest their honey. But here’s the rest of the story: Size matters!

Same Size 

Part of the problem with foundation is that those raised hexagons embossed on the sheet of wax or plastic are all the same size. There is no evil master plan driving this fact, it’s just that foundation is made by a machine. And machines know very little about the magical systems at work inside a hive of bees. But if you’ve ever seen natural honeycomb, drawn by bees, for bees—then you understand that one size does not fit all! Bees that are able to draw their own natural wax combs, without the use of foundation, make the cells the different sizes for different purposes: Worker bee brood is one size, drone bee brood is another, honey storage yet another...all these different sizes are very important to the inner workings of the colony.

Wrong Size 

Now, not only are all the cells on a sheet of standard cell foundation the same size—but they are also the wrong size. The difference between natural cell size (4.9 mm) and standard cell foundation (5.4 mm) is only .5 mm. Just a little bit wrong—but significant when you consider the size of a honeybee.

Let me segue here and introduce a tiny, oval-shaped, rusty-brown parasite — a frighteningly effective disease vector and the bane of beekeepers everywhere—the varroa mite. Since the mid-1980s, beekeepers in North America have been wrestling with this ubiquitous parasite. Apparently we inherited varroa mites from Asian honeybees, which were able to live symbiotically with them. But when the European races of honeybees living in North America were exposed to the varroa mite, they were mostly defenseless. 

That tiny difference between the cell size of natural beeswax comb and standard cell foundation—that extra half a millimeter—has made it easier for varroa mites to thrive and harder for honeybees to resist them. Enlarging the size of the cell even just that little bit extends the gestation period of the honeybee by approximately 24 hours. Part of that time—somewhere between 8 and 24 hours of it—occurs during the bee’s larval stage. 

The larval stage of the honeybee is the time during which the adult female varroa mite must enter the cell in order to be inside the cell after it is capped, and in order to breed. Once inside, the mite burrows into the brood food, beneath the larvae, extends its little snorkel-like breathing tubes and waits for the cell to be capped. Once the cell is capped the female varroa mite then emerges from beneath the larvae and proceeds to lay eggs.

Extending the length of the larval stage of the developing bee increases the odds in favor of the varroa mite by allowing more time for her to enter the cell. 

While no one set out to hurt the honeybee by using foundation, using it seems to have made both bees and beekeepers victims of the law of unintended consequences.

More Unintended Consequences 

There are more ways beekeepers have denied the perfection of the natural systems at work in the superorganism that is a bee colony.

The two advertisements shown on pages 18 and 21 list what were perceived as the benefits of the new methods in beekeeping available with the advent of the Langstroth hive. There is a benefit that the beekeeper be able to see “every inch of the hive,” to know the status of the queen, the brood and the hive’s food stores. It is also an improvement to not have to destroy the hive and the bees in order to harvest honey. However, here are some other features of hives and foundation that demonstrate how easy it is to become careless with the manipulation of nature’s systems. Some of the features listed may indeed be considered beneficial, but some are manipulative at such a deep level as to be pretty horrifying.

Preventing Natural Swarming 

Swarming is the reproductive process of every bee colony. According to some internal clock that is all their own — driven by weather, the size and health of the colony, the resources currently available to them in their locale and the amount of space remaining in the cavity of their hive—bees will begin swarm preparations. The steps involved in this mysterious process include the raising of drone bees and the production of swarm cells, through which the existing queen helps to create her own replacement by laying eggs into vertical swarm cells in order to produce a new queen bee. Swarming is the bees’ way of betting on the future and perpetuating their species. Beekeepers have always seemed to want to control and mechanize the reproductive process of the honeybee, and conventional beekeepers are commonly taught to cut out and destroy any swarm cells they find during an inspection in order to prevent swarming. Not only is it nearly impossible to thwart the swarm impulse once it has begun—but it’s likely that the destruction of swarm cells in the hive will leave the colony queenless—as the founding queen is the queen that departs with the swarm. Crushing the swarm cells the bees have made in preparation for reproducing is likely to leave them with no queen at all.

Multiplying the Number of Swarms at pleasure 

The modern equivalent of this is known as splitting. The beekeeper can divide the resources of one colony into two hives—and so long as the bees in the hive who wound up without a queen are able to produce a new queen bee, or the beekeeper provides an artificially raised queen from another source, the original colony now becomes two — and on the beekeepers’, not the bees’, schedule. This is not necessarily a bad thing—but it needs to be done in accord with the natural timing in the hive.

Taking The Honey in any Form or Quantity Desired Without Destroying the Bees 

In the days when bees were kept in fixed comb hives known as skeps or log gums, the only method of harvesting the honey was a destructive harvest— which involved destroying the entire colony in order to get at the honeyladen combs. The risk in harvesting honey so easily, however, is that the beekeeper may over harvest and leave the colony without sufficient resources to survive the winter season.

Limiting the Number of Drones 

Drones consume honey but do not gather nectar, build wax, care for brood or contribute to the maintenance of the hive. Drones have always taken a bad rap from beekeepers, who maintain that aside from mating with queens, drones do none of the work involved in maintaining the hive, but cost much to maintain. And so, drones are said to have little or no value. From a honey producer’s point of view, perhaps this is valid, but it ignores the potential effect that eliminating so much of the drone population has had on the genetic diversity of the bee population.

Controlling the Sex of the Bee 

Beekeepers also found that controlling the size of the cells on the foundation could dictate the sex of the bee that was raised in that cell. This led beekeepers to manipulate the gender balance in the hive by providing foundation sized so that it promoted only the raising of worker bees. Since in some views the presence of drone bees is less than desirable, fixed-size foundation offered an easy way to have fewer of them.

Changing the Size of the Bee 

At some point in the short history of modern beekeeping, people learned that a smaller cell would make smaller bees, and thus more bees per frame... and that a larger cell would make a larger bee, though fewer bees per frame. Perhaps the larger bee would be able to fly further, fly faster and be able to carry more nectar, resulting in the production of more honey? Foundation permitted reducing or enlarging cell size beyond what was found in natural combs. This is manipulation of a natural system at a deep level, and it appears to have contributed to the varroa mite’s prolific success.

Chemical Contamination in the Hive—the New Worry 

Since the advent of Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) in late 2006, researchers have become increasingly concerned about the effects of the chemicals being used by beekeepers to eradicate pests in the beehive. 

Many acaracides are extremely wax soluble, meaning that these compounds are absorbed into the beeswax comb of the hive—where they accumulate due to repeated applications over multiple seasons. This accumulation contributes to the mites’ developing resistance to the miticides, while the bees are sickened and stressed by the increasing levels of poison being absorbed into the comb, that special and essential structure where the bees store their food and raise their young.

Two common miticides are coumaphos and fluvalinate. Coumaphos, an organophosphate, is the active ingredient in CheckMite+, and fluvalinate, (tau-fluvalinate) a synthetic pyrethroid, is the active ingredient in Apistan. 

Both of these compounds are persistent. Picture this chain of events with me: 

The beekeeper treats the hive with CheckMite+—and treats it again next year and the year after. The mites by this time have developed a resistance to CheckMite, and so the beekeeper changes over to Apistan. The hive is treated this year and next year and the year after... and by this time the comb is quite old and dark and funky. The comb is then sent away to be recycled and made into brand new sheets of foundation. But these two miticides, along with other chemicals used by conventional beekeepers to treat their hives, survive this wax recycling process and they are now found in the wax of brand new sheets of foundation. 

This means that a brand new hive, outfitted with apparently fresh, clean sheets of wax foundation is actually already contaminated with coumaphos and fluvalinate. The long-term, sublethal effects of these pesticides are still being studied — but initial research indicates that there are important effects on brood, drone virility and queen longevity. This contamination was brought to light during preparation for a study done by a research team at the University of Georgia to learn more about these long-term, sublethal effects. This study’s focus was on four chemicals—fluvalinate, coumaphos, amitraz and copper

naphthenate—that have been used to treat honeybee colonies in the USA.2 The research team at MAAREC (The Mid-Atlantic Apiculture Research and Entension Consortium) studied 887 wax, pollen, bee and associated hive samples, and found 121 different pesticides and metabolites contained within those samples, including coumaphos and fluvalinate. They found 121 different pesticides contained in the hives, and especially in the wax. In another research project at the University of Georgia, the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences studied the interactions between the most common varroacides — coumaphos and fluvalinate. 

This study showed that the toxicity of each of these chemicals was greatly increased when it was found in combination with the other. In some cases toxicity was seen to increase by 4 times, in other cases as much as 32 times.4 Cornell University’s Pesticide Information Profiles (PIPs) provide detailed analysis of the biological and ecological effects of both coumaphos and fluvalinate.

A Few More Thoughts on the Use of Foundation 

Wrong Shape 

A less obvious concern, but still probably important to the bees, is the fact that a rectangle is not the shape of natural honeycomb. Bees build their comb from the top down—and in a rounded shape called a catenary curve. This is the same shape we would see if I handed you one end of a piece of chain and I held the other end and we looked at the curve, or drape, made by the hanging chain. This curve is both efficient and structurally sound. You will see this shape in beehives where the bees have built their own comb. It is a result of festooning — the bees hanging in a gentle curve, seemingly holding hands—building their comb in that same shape.

Bees Don’t Like 

It One last and yet very important thing must be said about the use of foundation inside beehives: The bees don’t like it. 

Every beekeeper of any longevity eventually learns that given the chance, bees are apt to build natural comb in any open space left inside the hive by the beekeeper, even when foundation has been provided. Here’s a particularly brilliant illustration of the bees’ distaste for foundation. A recent novice top bar beekeeper was worried that the bees he installed into his top bar hive would not want to stay inside the hive without a piece of foundation to work from. So he altered a top bar to hold a piece of standard wax foundation, and then he installed a package of bees into the hive. He called several weeks later to confess what he had done, and to report that after building nine bars of beautiful natural wax, the bees still had not touched the foundation he had provided.

Often, beekeepers find that the natural wax their bees build when they get the opportunity to build without the constraints of foundation contains many drone-sized cells. This is then followed by the remark that the bees build too many drones. Why would bees build more drones than they needed? Is there such a thing as “too many drones?” 

When bees are prevented from building drone cells by the fact that the foundation provides only worker-sized cells, it stands to reason, doesn’t it, that they draw lots of drone comb when given the option to build natural comb? They are playing catch-up. There’s no such thing as too many drones!

Does Standardization Make Sense? 

When we view ourselves as outside nature—separate from it, different from it, superior to it—we act as if we are exempt from nature’s laws. And this makes us callous and careless. 

Two ideas are at play here: standardization and interchangeability. Since standardized foundation began to be used consistently, many honeybee pests and problems have manifested to a frightening degree: tracheal mites, varroa mites, nosema and now the frightening disorder we call CCD. All these have gained a foothold, changing the face of beekeeping forever. The dangers of standardization spring from disregarding nature’s ways. Interchangeability allows us to support the nature’s systems at work inside the hive:

 •Being able to move bars from one hive to another to help a new beekeeper get started makes sense. •Being able to split a hive—and move bars of natural beeswax comb from an existing hive into a new hive in order to preempt a swarm and increase the size of your apiary — makes sense too. 

•Being able to offer a queenless hive a bar of open brood comb — the resource they need to make a new queen — also makes sense.

While there are many things to commend the concept of interchangeability, wax foundation with its standard-sized cells, designed to raise only worker honeybees, is not one of those things. The most important natural system inside the beehive is the creation of natural beeswax comb—wax made by bees, for bees—and it needs to stay that way.