Frame securing wire

01 · IT IS NOT WIRING WIRE

Two similar products with nearly the same name

Worth clearing up first, because the confusion is easy and expensive. Wiring wire is the fine wire tensioned between the side bars of a frame to hold the foundation; it goes inside the frame and is sold on a reel. This is something else: a wavy spacer fitted across the box, under the frames, whose job is not to hold wax but to stop the frames moving. If what you want is to wire frames, this is not the product — and our wooden frames, incidentally, already come wired and tensioned from the factory.

02 · WHAT THE WAVE DOES

It sets the gap and stops sideways movement

A frame hanging from its top bar has a loose bottom end, and that is where the trouble starts: move the hive and the frames swing, meet and rub, and what suffers is the comb, not the wood. The wavy profile does two things at once — it sets the spacing between frames at the bottom and holds them sideways, so the assembly reaches the apiary as it left the store. On equipment that travels, or that is loaded and unloaded often, the difference shows in whole combs.

03 · CHOOSE BY FRAME COUNT

It has to match the box it goes in

There are three variants: 8, 9 and 10 frames, and you take the one matching the box it will be fitted to. It is not a preference: too short or too long and it stops spacing — a short one does not reach the end frames and a long one will not seat. Count the frames your box actually carries, not the ones that would fit, and pick that variant. If you run boxes with different frame counts in the same apiary, you will need more than one size.

04 · BEFORE YOU BUY

It goes one per box — brood box or super — so do the sum by boxes and not by hives: a hive with a brood box and two supers takes three. And if you need the exact length of a particular variant to check it fits your equipment, write to us and we will confirm it: we would rather measure it than give you a figure that does not match what you will receive.