Post 24 of 29 in the AZ Hive series
The AZ frames I built — deep-foundation-sized, no ears, designed to slide into the AZ hive lengthwise — don’t fit a Langstroth nuc box. Which becomes a problem the day you want to split.
A split is how you make one colony into two: pull a few frames of brood, eggs, and food, plus the queen (or set them up to make a new one), put them in a separate box, and you’ve started a new colony. In a Langstroth-only operation, this is trivial — the frames are interchangeable. With AZ frames, you need a bridge.
Here’s the bridge.
The tab trick. Each AZ frame has small notches cut into the bottom bar. When I’m making a split, I slide a small 3D-printed tab up from the bottom over the notch, all the way to the top of the frame, where it hits the top bar and stops. The tabs stick out just enough to give the frame “ears” — the same kind of overhanging tabs a Langstroth frame has. Those make-shift ears rest on the rabbet of a Langstroth nuc box exactly the way a real Langstroth frame would.
It’s not pretty — well, actually it depends on your favorite color and what color filament we print them in — but it works.
The idea isn’t new with me. Plastic tabs are made and sold in Slovenia to convert AZ frames the same way.
The split sequence. I pull a few AZ frames out of the hive — brood, food, the works — and slide tabs up over the bottom-bar notches. Those frames go into a Langstroth nuc box. Add a few Langstroth frames to fill out the box. Bees get added. The nuc gets moved.
For a week or two, the colony lives in the nuc with the AZ frames inside it, the tabs holding everything up the way an ear would.
The swap. Once the colony has settled and started drawing comb, I swap the AZ frames out for proper Langstroth frames. The AZ frames go back to the AZ hive or into the freezer — tabs pulled out, notches still in place for next time. The new colony continues from there with native Langstroth equipment.
The swap slows the buildup of the new colony a little. The bees have to redraw whatever comb the AZ frames carried out into Langstroth foundation. That’s the cost of bridging two frame standards.
Next: The Build, Part 1: Templates and Side Panels — back to the workshop, where the AZ build process started.