Waxing my honey bee trays

Adding wax to your trays is an important step in making a good home for honey bees. I recently saw another bee keeper on Hive doing this, but a different way from my process. You can find a link below to how they make a press to design his own trays. Maybe next year I can design such a setup, seems like the way to go. But being my first time I am sticking to what others have told me and what the bee keeper I bought from suggested.

@hivelifebg/my-press-for-wax-bases
by @hivelifebg

I will be using foundation trays and starter strips, and then adding some warm wax to these trays to give the honey bees resources to start drawing out combs.

As of one of the final preparations to the bee hives, I melted down bees wax and applied it to the trays. This will help encourage the bees I will be placing in the hives to build out honey combs using it and to start producing their own.

When I got the trays I could see a tiny bit of it applied to the trays, but I was told by @meanbees the more the better. So I added more wax to these trays. I hear if theres too much the bees will just knock it off so no big deal.

The tools used for this is an old crockpot to heat up the bees wax pellets, a paint roller, and a brush. I soak the paint roller in the wax and then let some of it drip off before rolling it onto the foundation trays. The roller and brush were brand new so no paint was on them.

As I roll on the wax it quickly dries and forms a hard substance on the trays.

Once I flip them over to do the otherside it looks like the warm wax makes the trays change colors.

After rolling on the wax I go over the missed spots with a paint brush.

Moving onto the starter strips I only use a tiny bit of wax to coat the top, these trays the bees will draw out the comb and hopefully fill the whole frame.

I place them back into the beehive once done and move onto the next tray, each of my hives hold about 8 trays so I had 16 total to do.

One box done and one more to go, since I have two bee hives.

Setting up my next foundation tray I use the roller again and let the wet wax drip off so theres not so much on the roller. And then I get the rest with my paint brush.

With some extra bees wax at the end of the tray painting process I decided to use the rest on a stick. Ill place this stick near the hive and see if they try to collect the wax from off of it. Just wanted to use of the rest of the wax, no idea if its useful.

One last things needs to be done to these hives, and thats install the entrance reducer. When a hive is not strong yet the guards outside the hive can only watch over a small area, so by reducing the space for bees to enter the guards can do a better job. I will use some wire screen to do this and will show hows its done in a future post.

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