Housel Position of Foundation

When I picked up my packages of bees, an experienced bee-keeper talked to me about many bee-keeping ideas, one was the "Housel Position of the Foundation" and it went through my brain like water through a sive, so I began an internet quest to figure it out.

It seems that Michael Housel studied feral bee colonies in his area and found that there was a system to the way the bees laid in their wild foundation. Wild bees get no frames, they have to hang their wax from the top edge of the hive space. Bee-keepers use wood or plastic frames and the frames hold a manufactured foundation that may be made of bee's wax or plastic with an embossed hexagon pattern on it. The basis of bee foundation, the flat layer that the tubes are drawn out from is always a hexagon.

Even pre-schoolers in this day and age who play with pattern blocks in know that ther is a Y embedded into the making of a flat hexagon into a dimensional hexagon. Also they know that the Y can be right-side-up or up-side-down or sideways!

The wild bees it seems prefer the Y to be right-side-up on the out side edge of the hive, and the hive having two out side edges, to reverse the direction of the Y's in the center, more symetrically, at the center line. So if you have a ten frame hive your foundation would look like this (<= the right-side up Y side of the foundation): <<<<< >>>>>, so five frames of the right side up Y facing each ouside edge of the hive.

Since there is a front and a back to the hive and you are supposed to approach you hive from the back, this would be the direction to face when placing the frames in this configuration. It helps to mark the frames with a sharpie while sitting quietly in the house with no bees buzzing around your face, just draw an arrow pointing to the right-side-up Y position on each frame and it will all work out.

In my research, I found some beekeepers who thought that this was all a big bunch of hooey, "The bees don't care they said." Well my bees may not care, but it makes sense to me that my bees are way more organized than I am and that if I don't put their frames in right I may ruin their hive's Feng Shuai. Then they would be discontented bees and want to redecorate, and since they cant change the way I put the foundation in they may want to leave home.......

April 2008

My packages of bees were ready to pick up on April 16, 2008 and I went to get them. They arrive in screen boxes with a can of food (sugar suryp) and a little queen cage inside the box.....I had never handled a bee package before and was somewhat leery of 10,000 bees in a box. I had two boxes and two marked queens. The bee-man gave me some mini-marshmallows to put in the hole of the queen cage so she can eat her way out of the cage. No one told me to take a safety pin or a nail to remove the cork, so my queens had to stumble around with the cork in their little cage as they ate their way out. "Sorry girls," I said, "I have no idea what I'm doing, please forgive me." They escaped in the expected amount of time so I'm assuming they did (forgive me that is).

I had to get some new hive bodies, some more frames and another top and bottom board to add another hive to my collection of ONE from 2007, so now I have TWO. Assembly takes about ten minutes if you buy the parts ready to go like I did.

Now to pour the bees into the hive, or rather to shake them into the hive, well they rather liked the screen cage and lifting out the can of food to let them out of the box made my heart sing and my blood pressure rise. They didn't want to move so much but I got most of them out. Then I hung the little cage with the queen between the middle frames. Next I put on the inner cover, the feeders of 1:1 suryp, an empty hive box and the then the top cover. Whew, do all of that once more and I'm done in for the day, (I am stressed out by all these bees). The second hive went faster and more smoothly than the first, and then I put the opened and almost empty packages in front of their respective hives very close to the entrance. By 5:00 (that is quitting time for bees you know) all and I mean all but the few dead bees that you are supposed to expect were out of the boxes and into the hives for the night. I slipped in the entrance reducers and said "See ya in three days."

Thee days later: the queens had escaped, the mini-marshmallows had disapeared, the bees were all over the frames and an inch of the food had been eaten (the food is a suryp of one part sugar to one part water presented in quart jars, inverted with special lids with teeniney holes in a snowflake pattern, placed on a board with holes in it) this feeder is suposed to NOT cut their delicate tongues.....all was well in apiaryland for the novice beekeper. Thanks bees for knowing what to do. You remind me of all of my childhood aquariam guppies who came from the pet store already knowing how to swim!

Next bee check in two weeks.........

Year one 2007 In a Nutshell (One Hive Strong)

I purchased my first hive in the spring, scared spitless of getting stung and having bees in my face, I bought the bare minimum to see if I liked keeping bees. I had read Sue Monk Kidd's book, Bee Season. That and a few library books were my only prelude to the adventure. I endured the fear and became comfortable with the bees, careful to work the hive from the back. I harvested about 2 gallons of honey, and enough wax from my simple 'crush method' of extraction to make a couple dozen lip balms of 2/3 wax to 1/3 olive oil. Pretty simple really and I found the little lip balm containers on E-Bay. My hive wintered over despite my inexperience and I checked for survivors on a balmy late winter day. Here in the Pacific Northwest we have a few of those in late February and early March.....well the field bees were out of the hive and I thought my group was smaller than a baseball, so I ordered bees.