many bee farmers - ged marshall included - alternate drawn comb with starter strips in supers - every penny counts when it's your livelihood so saving a couple of quid on foundation for every super is a sensible thing to do.
????
Even today thick super foundation only costs me 22p a sheet and thin super only 14p..................by the time you even lay it out and cut it you have lost any advantage financially. OK I buy big amounts and your prices will probably be a lot higher, but even so, review the figures below.
A poster touched on loss of honey crop..........
The following table was a result of experiments we did back in the 1980s regarding honey yield with various formats on similar calibre colonies. The number shown is the proportion as a percentage of the best outcome (drawn deeps). TS is 'thin super'. All hives in the experiment were wooden Smith hives.
Drawn Deeps 100
Drawn Shallows 77
Foundation Deeps 70
Foundation Shallows 62
TS Shallows 41
TS starters 26
Sections 14
The difference between using 1.40 worth of thin super and say 47p worth of starter strips (discounting labour costs for the fiddly operation involved) is 97p. The loss of crop is 15% of a super of honey as (but actually 37% against thin super full sheets rated as 100%) Yield is only 26% of the crop available using fully drawn deeps.
Standard heather crop average here over manymany years is 44.2lb
thin super 18.4
starters 11.5
so........6.9lb LESS heather honey percolony using starters as opposed to full sheets
at todays rates you SAVE approx 1.94 on foundation
and you LOSE 17.94 in honey at bulk rates ( a lot more at cut comb rates)
Compare it to drawn comb and the sums get scary.
Rocket science?