How to salvage honey bee foundation. Our club received about 50 medium and swallow frames with new foundation as a donation. The problem was that it had bee left out in the sun and the foundation had warped. It had also been ruffly handled and the foundation had broken and cracked. I was on the verge of cutting it all out and installing new wax when I had the idea of flattening it. The was was more than two years old so it was brittle and when I try to flatten it it cracked. I decided to soften it in the oven. I think 120F would have been the ideal temperature to soften the wax but the lowest setting on my oven was 170F. On the first attempt, I preheated the oven to 170F, turned it off and, put in the wax in for 3 minutes. It wasn't soft enough so I left it in the oven for 3 minutes with the oven on and that worked very well. After that, I heated a super of wax for three minutes, removed it, put in another super, set the oven cook timer to 3 minutes, and quickly pressed the hot wax. I had to restart and reset the oven each time. Since home oven can vary in temperature +/- 20F and the melting temperature of beeswax is 180F I was worried that the wax would melt it I left it in the oven too long. If my oven could have been set to 150F I could have proceeded at a more relaxed pace. Let me know in the comments how this works for you.
26 авг 2024
