I hadn't even considered opening the hive on my own but the desire to see what was going on inside outweighed my hesitation and I decided to go for it. Sorry there are no pictures of in hive interior but iIcan report that there was absolutely no room available in the brood box or honey supers. The entire hive was jam packed with bees, comb and sweet sweet honey!
In the honey super with the missing frame they had filled the empty space with comb attached to the wall which I removed to put the new frame in. It was beautifully made and filled with deliciousness, too bad it got all warped and distorted on removal because it was warm and soft and honey was dripping everywhere.
It took superhuman willpower but I managed to save some for you:
The brood box was completely filled with bees, and the plastic frame was all drawn out. There were so many bees it was difficult to see what was in the cells, and i only pulled out the middle four frames because their sound began to increase both in volume and pitch so I decided to finish up as quick as possible. So my inspection wasn't complete, but I can report that I did see open cells with brood, cells capped with white, cells capped with yellow and honey. Mostly i saw bees. We thought there were a lot of bees the last time we looked, but I'm tellin' you what, there were just bees upon bees covering every surface, and more bees in the air all around. I didnt see any queen cells, and that strange bulge on frame #4 (counting from the track side) was still there, still closed and didnt look any different as far as I could remember. What could it be?
The queen excluder was all covered with burr comb dripping with delicious honey. I scraped off some and gave it to the kids, but I left a lot simply because there were so many bees all over it that it was hard to tell what was what. also it was hot and i was sweatin like a hog.
I quickly put the new brood box, the excluder, then honey super and then the two full ones on top. Maybe I overestimated my strength because it took almost all my power to lift all that honey to the top of the stack. with 2 brood boxes and 3 honey supers the hive is a beautiful tall tower:
Even though the boxes should only be painted white I couldn't resist adding a little pastel color just for fun. I read all over the interweb about alternate colors and the consensus seemed to be that only light colors should be used due to heat concerns, but beyond that the bees dont care.
All in all I am very pleased with the work of cleaning up the boxes and fixing up the frames with new clean foundation and replaced missing/broken wire (one frame is fixed up with a guitar string) and cutting down two large frames to make up for the missing ones. The bees have a lot of room now to expand their operations and judging by their flight traffic they are busy doing it. Go Bees!
oh my goodness, that is just SPECTACULAR. so so much work you did, it's truly amazing. i especially wish i was there to help you with the heavy lifting, but also, i ought to have been around more for the cleaning up of those frames and puttin' in the foundation. i absolutely do not deserve you to have saved comb for me, PLEASE feel free to eat or distribute amongst the kids and your household. trust me, there'll be lots more when we extract those top two, and i'll carve off some of that burr comb when we lift 'em off too... so go ahead and enjoy!
ReplyDeletethankyou thankyou thankyou for your efforts and know i am super excited about the glorious colour and size of the tower too, it's *sweeeeet*. go bees go!
"...so go ahead and enjoy!"
ReplyDeleteAll right! you don't have to tell me twice!
So just got back from the honeybee festival (which was slightly lame, but meh...) where I talked to one of the beeks there who said that if you put two brood boxes together the bees will 1. become aggressive and 2. you will get less honey.
He said it is better to take 3-4 brood frames and put them into a box above separated by the queen excluder, and put fresh frames into the brood box that she can lay into. This way she can still lay at full speed, while avoiding the issue of brood box being used for honey storage and also avoid the issue of aggressive bees.
Apparently if a hive is too strong they will become mean, but i dont know if this is fact or just this guy's opinion.
Anyway it is something to think about, since the blue brood box has only foundation, there is still time to swap frames around if it seems like a good idea.
After reading more around the interwebs it seems there are plenty of people with a different opinion about using 2 or even 3 brood boxes, and this guy teaching the concept of unlimited broodnest management: http://www.bushfarms.com/beesulbn.htm
ReplyDeleteso, Im not worried, tho it may be a good idea to move some brood frames up to encourage them using the upper box.
yes, i definitely think that is a good idea, to put the new frames into the bottom brood box, and some brood frames (making sure the queen's not on them) up into the other one. i'm not sure what i think about the placement of the queen excluder. probably i think we should just leave her in the bottom, and then we can put some brood up there, and leave the rest for their winter honey. i'll do some research on it too.
ReplyDelete