Thank you everyone for the suggestions. I got word at work today that my bees were in and that I needed to pick them up tonight. Well, I teach at Emory on Monday nights and wasn't through until 9 - then I drove 30 min south to get the bees, so by the time I got home it was almost 10:30. I put the nucs on the deck where the hives are and came in to do the starter strips.
I had the empty frames and the small cell foundation. So first I cut the foundation into strips. It helps to be a quilter - I used my cutting board and a rotary cutter:
Then I melted the beeswax from last year in a junk double boiler - now that I'm done I understand why it has to be a junk double boiler - always from hence forth used for wax.
I appreciate everybody's suggestions about how to substitute for the wax fastener. I thought about the meat injection thing - which I don't have - so I got out my turkey baster but decided it was too big and inaccurate. Then I got a spoon to try Michael's idea about bending it but I only had a set of pliers and I needed a vise, I guess, to bend it. I walked past the place where my baby grandson was playing the other day and there was a tiny bread pan he had used (one that I bake bread in at Christmas for small gifts) and went AH HA!!! So that's what I used:
It worked GREAT! I probably used more wax than I needed to but I poured a tiny line of wax into the groove and then set the cut SC starter strip in it and YAY - it worked:
So I have 12 frames ready to go - six for each hive to go on either side of the four frames from the nucs.
Thank you, thank you, thank you to everybody who always helps me on this forum - what a gift!
Linda T on a late bee night in Atlanta :shock: