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.......