The concept of partial foundation frames is pretty simple, the rigid plastic foundation that comes cut to fit standard langstroth equipment is cut in half, or thirds and installed in the wooden frame as normal. We used a chop saw to cut small stacks of the foundation very slowly with a sharp blade so as not to shatter the plastic- allowing the blade to speed up all the way before beginning the cuts seemed to help. The installation of the partial sheets is very fast and easy, but we do have some recommendations for installation in the hive and for preparing a hive for any kind of foundationless removable comb. 

Before introducing any kind of foundationless options for our bees, we do our best to level the hive or stand. We learned the hard way that our bees are as subject to the laws of gravity as we are, and any new comb being drawn will typically hang straight up and down.  If your hive is a little bit slanted from one side to the other (forward or back is fine) the bees will build comb straight downwards, coming away from (and sometimes disconnected from) the bottom and sides of the frame.  If your comb isn't hanging straight in the frame it can make inspections very difficult or damaging, and it will affect every other new frame that it is placed next to.  (We actually try to slope our hives a bit forwards to help with drainage, but are now very careful to avoid side to slide slanting! There were some very angry hive notes from that day...)

Handling frames like this also require some consideration of temperature and gravity.  Consider how heavy the two foundationless pieces of comb are on either side of the foundation, and looking at how well they are or are not attached to the frame side bars can give you some indication of how best to handle a frame like this.  If its really hot out, all of that new wax will be slightly more prone to sagging and breaking. Generally, free-drawn comb is very strong if held upright, but if you're accustomed to flipping frames back and forth (the bottom of the frame towards you for example) then all of that weight is distributed much differently and the comb can crack and break off.  Tipping the frame from left to right or even upside down is usually just fine, but habits can be hard to break and some folks have told us they get too frustrated by more delicate comb during inspections or extracting.  We are not a large scale honey outfit, and we try to make our inspections as calmly and carefully as we can- these partial foundation frames don't change much for our hive manipulations, as long as we have taken the time to install them carefully as I will explain below.   

So if you'd like to try this out please let us save you a little bit of headache with a few simple considerations:

1. As mentioned before, level your hive body or stand from side to side so that the comb will be drawn straight up and down in the frames.  
2. Install new partial-foundation frames between fully-drawn frames or full sheets of foundation, and space them close together to avoid crazy comb. If you install multiple frames of partial foundation right next to each other, you are more likely to experience cross-comb and funky shapes in the spaces next to the foundation. Sometimes you can cut the edges of those comb pieces and push them back into the frame, sometimes it may be easier to just cut it out all together.  
3. ​In my experience (and Lauri mentions this as well) the cell size surrounding the new partial or foundationless frame can dictate what is drawn in the space where your bees have the choice.  So if there's drone comb next to them, they seem more likely to draw drone comb in the space you've just provided.  
4. Until your bees have begun to draw the frame out, the partial sheet will slide back and forth in the frame- we think it's nice to have the sheet centred in the frames, but nailing/stapling the sheet to centre it seems like too much work when the comb will quickly fix it in place.  So we are just careful to centre the foundation as we are installing it.  
5. Your bees WILL draw drone comb if they've never been given the option of drawing it before... We find that if there is drone comb available to the hive then the urge to draw more is reduced and they again will be motivated to draw worker comb. (Read: if you constantly cut out drone comb, your bees will be sure to constantly draw you more of it...)

Overall we were pretty happy with these partial foundation frames, and will build some more next year. We liked the option of cutting out comb for specialty comb honey jars as they sell well in our region. As beekeepers that value foundationless frames for various reasons, but transport their hives on bumpy roads and use a radial extractor, this little equipment hack seems to be good middle ground. 

This step is a pain, but now each of our new boxes can be used for making/wintering nucs, mating/banking queens, or as a standard hive body.  In the case of a 3 colony box created by adding two division boards, we will have to use a different hive bottom, or integrate upper entrances. 

Once all the grooves had been cut, we finally began assembling the boxes. Three boxes into the assembly, we realized there must be a better way.  We use an assembly jig for the frames, and the same idea can apply to these commercial boxes (because everything is milled to be very nearly identical, unlike the rough cut cedar I'm used to working with). It's not perfect, but this box assembly jig I threw together helped keep things straight and square, and allowed for the construction of two boxes at a time (more would begin to get heavy/awkward to flip and rotate).  I sawed up an old semi-hollow interior door that was nice and light but surprisingly rigid for this assembly box.  The concept is simple enough- if you build your jig perfectly square and to the right dimensions for a tight fit, the hive bodies you assemble within the jig will come out right almost every time.  We glue each finger joint, and then use a rubber mallet to persuade the joints together. We did decide to use some long screws to pull the finger joints together even tighter, before adding nails to the remaining finger joints.  You could definitely get good results just with nails, or using clamps, but we liked the way the screws fixed any warping or cupping in each piece (especially since we will plan to slide division boards into those very shallow grooves we mentioned earlier. 

This was about half-way there.  Just a couple coats of paint left to apply, and then we have 75 versatile boxes to support our growing operation.  Now we just need the snow to stop falling so we can put these to use! 

Working with scraps of material left over from other projects, these stands were relatively easy to produce.  I did 25 of these for this season, and they feel sturdy enough to last a good while as well as hold up under the heavy stacks of honey we have to be optimistic for! 

Considering that screened bottom boards constructed with similar components are available for purchase (not at wholesale prices mind you) for over $30CAD- making 25 of these out of scrap wood and purchased a roll of #8 hardware cloth, screws, nails, glue, and mis-tinted wood stain, I think I easily saved $20 each.  Yes, that's a savings of about $500, with very conservative calculations.  They did take a few afternoons of work to build, but I feel happy enough with this product already.  

We prefer to use inner covers and a telescoping hive roof over migratory lids, as well as feed using frame feeders for queen rearing.  We built screened bottoms into the stand with the slide-in bottoms for monitoring natural mite-drop.  Our next versions will integrate slatted bottom racks to aid ventilation, and clustering.  We decided to double-wall and insulate our PVC connections to assist with, and take advantage of any temperature regulation being performed by the two outer colonies.  ​

Because our short and moderate summers on the Pacific Northwest are generally cool in the evenings, grafting into a lid above the frames as described in the BIBBA article may not be as practical for us as it might be in warmer locations.  We use a grafting frame for this reason, and have enjoyed great success.  This photo shows one of our very first attempts at grafting into this system. 
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We experimented with this system during the summer of 2016, and quickly began producing nice large cells consistently.  

The Virgin Queens were well fed, a nice size, and were for the most part happily accepted by the queenless colonies they were intended for.  

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I hope you read the original post about this method by following the BIBBA link provided above, but in case you need any further convincing there are a few things we thought worth adding and reinforcing. 

Benefits of this Queen Rearing System
A huge advantage of this system for folks that may not have the experience grafting, is that it is so forgiving.  If you're just learning, grafting is one of those 'practice makes perfect' kind of things, and if you're shaking bees into a queenless box the day before your graft only to have that graft completely (or even mostly) fail- it can be very disappointing to the beekeeper and plenty disruptive to the bees.  Because this system has a dedicated grafting box, checking or replacing your grafts does not involve completely dismantling a full-size colony, or confining any bees at any point.  Generally, your bees should be happier (by that I mean less agitated or aggressive) because they are never actually queenless, which is fantastic if your apiary is near any human neighbours who don't like getting stung etc.  And a failed graft can simply be tried again- on the spot.  Generally no need to do any more manipulating than you already did to set up your box.   

This system can be used both as a cell starter, and as a cell finisher all in one- no need to move your grafts to a finishing colony.  This alone means you're disturbing the process less, and the started cells do not have to be exposed or removed from the grafting box before they're fully capped, or even fully developed days later.  This means that if you have somewhere for these cells to go, (like an incubator, or queenless colonies in the same apiary that you're wanting to re-queen) you could be grafting into this box every 5 days if conditions are good.   

This season we even banked queens in cages in this central box when we we had too many queens, and it worked wonderfully.  We did not notice much difference in temperament when we caged and banked either mated, or virgin queens in the central box, and we did not have to do anything special to prepare the grafting box for use as a queen bank, as it already has all of the right conditions for such a purpose, as it is highly populated with well-fed young nurse bees motivated to care for young queens.  

If for some reason you don't need to raise any queens, these colonies don't need any attention in addition to your regular inspections.  However, we did find a virgin queen in our grafting box last year that ruined a couple good grafts, so along with the usual manipulations it's worth being certain you don't have some rogue queen halfway down the connecting tubes by staying on top of any emergency or swarm cells that might get started on the brood frames in that central box.  

This is the kind of congestion we would be grafting into.  Remember that these bees are there voluntarily!  Each box has its own entrance, and the regular rotation of open brood frames from the outer colonies draws the nurse bees through the excluders to the central box with the brood pheromones.   

There are some experiences we would like to pass on with regards to management of this system.  

Watch out for Moving Queens and Queen Pheromone Around
As you can read in the original BIBBA article, rotating brood frames from the outer two colonies into this central grafting box draws nurse bees through the excluders to feed them.  These are the bees that will raise your queens.  Brood frames that have been taken from the parent colonies should of course be carefully inspected to ensure that they are not hiding the queen, before being transferred to the central box.  It is worth noting that these 'new' frames will still have plenty of residual queen pheromone present on them (and the bees that populate those frames), and we always seemed to have better grafting success if we moved the frames in advance of the intended graft so that the queen pheromones subsided. 

Box Size
​Queen larvae have to be extremely well-fed, and we have had best success using a frame feeder as pictured- but it takes up more space than we would like in this 5 frame box.  We have built two more of these systems for use next year, and have made them a frame and a half wider to accommodate the frame feeder.  If you're using jar feeders (or something else) you may not feel that the boxes need to be any wider.   A 6.5 frame box may seem like an awkward size to have kicking around, but we won't be using these boxes for anything else since they've all got large holes bored in the sides.  We are feeling pretty confident that this size will be better for our purposes and the way we manage our bees.  

We've had a number of people emailing and messaging us about the use or construction of this system, and we wanted to provide a little more photo documentation and management suggestions after another season using it.  This past year we ran two of these 'magic boxes' (as our beekeeping friends have begun to refer to them), we installed 5 frame NUCs into them in late May. The slightly larger 6.5 frame size of the most recent versions was very nice to work with compared to the tight 5 frame boxes we first built.  A little more wiggle room when removing delicate graft frames was certainly appreciated.

It's been noted by far more experienced queen breeders that it seems the bees improve on working grafted cells with 'practice'- something that we also observed in using this system to raise our queens.  Just like the year before, our grafts were more readily accepted after a round or two of cell building.  Below is a photo of our first graft frame of 2017 being added to the central box. 

It doesn't take long for two 6 frame queenright colonies to build up a nice population of young bees. We rotate frames of capped/emerging brood and older open brood to the central box at least an hour before we plan to graft to prepare the box to accept the graft frame.  We don't have as much acceptance of our grafts if we are rotating frames from the outer boxes to the central box at the same time as we introduce the grafts, probably because there are still strong queen pheromones present on the frames. The timing tends to work well for us to check and set up the grafting box, and then make an inspection of the rest of our yard, and graft from a breeder queen at the end of that yard inspection.  We monitored the nectar flow and rarely felt it was necessary to supplement with sugar syrup this year. It could be simply a product of the good nectar flow this summer, but we also increased the number of cells we would add in one graft to around 25.  The cells produced on the flow were well fed and birthed some great looking queens.

We use a sturdy music stand to hold our frame upright while transferring capped cells to our incubator (I built that using an old dead refrigerator).  

Of course not all of the grafts are always successful, but it's nice to know your system is populated enough to quickly build comb.  In this case there was a virgin lose in the grafting box, which just happened the one time this season but certainly ruined a small batch of grafts. 

We have experimented with supering the queenright 'towers' (as they are referred to by John Harding) as pictured earlier in this article but found that the queens would move their brood nest up into the supers- something that we thought to be undesirable if the goal is to draw nurse bees from the outer brood nests to the middle.  We wanted to ensure the brood nest of each queenright box was directly adjacent to the grafting box to encourage the wafting of open brood pheromones from the central box to attract nurse bees from the outer boxes. Instead of supering the outer boxes, we regularly remove drawn frames from them as needed. This practice keeps the colonies building comb, and provides us with additional supply of frames we can add to other NUCs and colonies.  We think that plenty of congestion is achieved this way where we want it, while inspections are faster, and there is less equipment needed for this system.  

For a small operation, these boxes will provide you with not only queens, but a regular supply of new drawn combs and of brood/bees to populate mating NUCs or boost other colonies.  At the end of our beekeeping season heading into winter, the central grafting box was full of capped honey, and the workers all retreated back to cluster around their queen in the outer boxes.  We removed the honey frames from the grafting box and left it empty, but closed the entrance to the central box.  We are wintering our bees in this arrangement, and today January 10, 2018 they were making cleansing flights despite substantial snow cover during a brief sunny period.

What are mason bees? 

Mason bees are a group of bees in the Osmia genus. There are 140 species in North America, about 60 in BC! They are solitary, meaning that they don't live in a colony with other bees (unlike honey bees which live in colonies of 50-100,000 individuals). Instead, the male and female mason bees live and work alone, except for mating. (See lifecycle diagram below.) Mason bee females may nest together in mason bee homes we provide them, but they don't really interact with each other. 

The males are smaller than the females, have longer antennae, and often have fuzzy blonde moustaches- no joke!! The males can't sting, and while the females can sting, it's unlikely. ​

How do I "keep" mason bees? 

Mason bees do not require extensive maintenance like honey bees. You can simply buy or make a mason bee home (lots of style options, but make sure you can take the whole home apart to access cocoons in the fall, or use paper tube liners in drilled holes), mount it outside in late February/March, and wait for wild mason bees to find it. They will get busy laying eggs in the home, and then it's your job to clean the home in August-October, and store the cocoons over the winter to keep them safe. 

Why do I need to clean the cocoons and mason bee home? ​In nature their cocoons wouldn't get cleaned! 

​When we put up a mason bee home, we are encouraging the bees to lay a bunch of eggs very close together. In the wild, the bees would be forced to lay a few eggs over here in a hollow stem, and a few over somewhere else. With many nests together, it's easy for parasites to locate them and move from one nest tube to another. Your whole mason bee home could become a breeding ground for parasitic wasps, pollen mites, fungi, etc. over the winter (see photos below). So because we are setting up these unnatural situations, it's important for us to be responsible and give the bees a hand, so we don't do more harm than good. ​