Langstroth Plastic frame

01 · BEFORE YOU USE IT

Give it a coat of wax: that is what decides whether they draw it

The plastic carries the cell pattern, but it smells of plastic, and a colony with better options ignores it. Before it goes in, give it one or two coats of molten wax at 60-70 °C, by brush or dipping: that layer gives it the smell and the relief a bee recognises, and from there she works it like any other frame. An uncoated frame can sit untouched all season, and that is not the colony's fault.

02 · WHAT IT SAVES YOU

No foundation, no wire, no transformer

The saving is bench time: no sheets to buy, no wire to thread, nothing to tension and nothing to embed. A hundred wooden frames is a long evening; a hundred of these is wax and go. In the honey house it takes the extractor at full speed without warping or losing the comb, which is exactly where a wooden frame with foundation suffers — above all with dense honeys.

03 · SIZE

Langstroth brood: 482 × 235 mm

It measures 482 mm across the top bar, 235 mm high and 25 mm wide, and weighs half a kilo: this is the Langstroth brood size. It will not go into a Langstroth super, because that box takes a shallower frame. The 25 mm width acts as a stop against the next frame, so no spacer rail is needed.

04 · BEFORE YOU BUY

It arrives uncoated: the wax for the coat is separate, and it is material you probably already have. If you have never used plastic frames, start with a few in a strong colony during a nectar flow, which is when bees accept anything new most readily.