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« Last post by BeeMaster2 on Today at 09:51:35 am »
When bees move into A large space, they only have to protect the areas that have drawn comb. If you add a lot of drawn comb to a small hive, they have to waste too many bees to protect it and it seriously slows them down. In the wild , bees will move into a large cavity in a tree and start building from the top and work their way down as the hive grows. Here in North Florida, bees often build open air hives from tree branches or the underside of eaves. The size of the area around the hive is basically infinite. Yet they often thrive. I did an open air removal in May that according to the gate guard at the glass factory started as a swarm no bigger than my fist in March. That was a very cold spring that year and they called me because it was getting to bee bigger than a basketball.
I removed one open air hive that was on a branch high up in a tree that nobody knew was there until it got so heavy that it made the branch sag down to about 10 feet off the ground. It was three feet long and about 14? wide. Again the space it was in was basically infinite.
Jim Altmiller