I spent the afternoon fitting foundation into brood frames and making a cake, a honey recipe I hadn't tried before, that used wholemeal flour and vegetable oil instead of butter. The book said it needed to cook for about an hour and a half at 170 degrees Celsius, and since the Aga doesn't do anything between 180 C and just below boiling I was going to have to improvise, so sitting in the kitchen to react to the first smell of burning seemed a better bet than disappearing into the garden with the timer in my pocket. Besides, it had rained over lunchtime leaving a legacy of wet foliage and distinctly cold air and I didn't think my chest would take kindly to either.
The brood frames in a commercial beehive measure sixteen inches by ten, hung landscape wise. Two vertical end bars with grooves on their inward sides are nailed to a top bar. The wax foundation, which is impressed with hexagons the size of worker bee larvae cells, is reinforced with a zig zag strand of wire that projects in loops at the top and bottom of the wax sheet. You bend one set of loops through ninety degrees and put the wax sheet in the wooden frame so that the wire loops rest on the underside of the top bar, while the sides of the sheet of foundation slip into the grooves in the side bars.
With me so far? This is where a YouTube tutorial video would come in handy, if you actually wanted to fit foundation into a frame yourself. Once the wax sheet is lying snug and flat in its frame, top edge close up against the top bar, sides neatly caught by the side bars, bottom resting on a very thin bottom bar that you've previously tapped into its tiny receiving slots and tacked to the side bars, you then nail a batten over the top wire loops, holding them securely. Then you fit a second very thin bottom bar to the bottom of the sides so that the bottom of the foundation sheet rests between them but is not tacked in place. What could be simpler?
Quite a lot of things, as it happens. You want the wax to be at a comfortable working temperature, not too cold or it will be brittle, but not too warm or it will start bending and breaking in your fingers like over-warm pastry. The kitchen gets to about the right temperature at this time of year with the Aga, but you wouldn't want to be doing it in a cold shed in winter. You don't want to be doing it in a shed in the warmer months, either, unless it's bee proof, because the smell of fresh wax will soon bring them along to investigate, and accidents can happen. The Systems Administrator got stung that way, making up frames in a workshop with several curious bees.
You want to tap the wax into its side slots gently, working from both faces and not applying too much force, so as to keep clean edges. As soon as the edges get bent or broken it becomes much harder to get both sides to fit into their slots all the way down. Wax foundation is not the easiest stuff to transport, being apt to melt or break if it gets too hot or cold or is roughly handled, and I was pleased that the fifty sheets I ordered from a new supplier I haven't tried before arrived in mint, crisp condition. If the sheet is catching anywhere on either end it will buckle and refuse to lie flat. If it does that do not force it, investigate where the sticking point is and gently ease it into the slot. When it's sitting properly it will lie absolutely level.
Now comes tacking on the batten that's going to hold it to the top bar. You press the batten in place and turn the frame upside down, resting it on a solid surface, in my case the kitchen table. You take a tiny nail, half an inch long or a shade longer, and hammer it through the batten so that it goes through one of the wire loops and into the top bar. You repeat with all the wire loops, and maybe add one or two nails for luck if the batten doesn't feel absolutely secure. Once the bees have drawn out the comb and filled it with brood and stores on both sides it will be heavy, you will need to pick it up regularly and turn it over to look at both sides, and you really, really don't want the frame disintegrating in the middle of a hive inspection.
Notice how I glossed over the tricky bit there. You hammer the nail through the batten. Just like that. You just hammer it. Which means that you take a half inch nail in your right hand (assuming you are right handed) and position it where you want it to be, pressing it into the wood as much as you can with your bare fingers. Then you hold the nail between two fingers of your left hand so that its tiny head is just proud of your fingernails, and tap it with a small hammer. The tip of the nail is resting less than half an inch out from the wax sheet, which will limit your room to manoeuvre, and you would like the nail to go in reasonably vertically.
Now all sorts of things can happen. Possibly the tip of the nail will skate sideways over the batten, and you will have to put down the hammer, reposition the nail and start again. Once you feel the nail start to grip you can take your left fingers away and use them to press the batten firmly up against the wax while you hammer. At this point the nail may prove not to have started to grip after all, and jump out of its hole, skating across the kitchen table if it doesn't disappear behind the batten, in which case you will need to retrieve it because otherwise the batten won't sit snugly against the frame. If you are unlucky then at this point the wax will drop out of its grooves and you are back to square one. Maybe the nail will go in half way, and just as you think you are home and dry the next hammer blow will send it at a mad diagonal, so that it barely reaches through the batten to the frame and is of no use at all.
My first frame took me so long I began to think that at this rate the bees would have swarmed before I'd completed a brood box's worth. Then I got back into the rhythm of it, and had done a couple of dozen by the time the SA wanted the kitchen to make the supper. I didn't think the smell of fried onions would agree with the foundation, and was obliged to give the kitchen back over to culinary purposes.
I made a mistake with the cake. It rose spectacularly, much more than I was expecting, but after an hour the top was just starting to catch and I tried moving it over to the simmer oven like you do with Christmas cake, where it collapsed in the middle. Only then did I twig that of course Christmas cake uses plain flour and no raising agent and barely rises at all, whereas this recipe used self raising with a teaspoon of bicarb for good measure. I shall try again, cutting out some discs of greaseproof paper and tinfoil to put over the top after the first hour to stop it burning. Of course it would be easier simply to ignore any recipes for cakes cooked at less than 180 C, but before I do that I need to prove to my own satisfaction that I can't wangle a way round the problem somehow. There are people who keep a second cooker for such difficulties, but we don't. It's Aga or nothing. Or in this case honey cake modelled on a Polo Mint.
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