Beemaster's International Beekeeping Forum
BEEKEEPING LEARNING CENTER => GENERAL BEEKEEPING - MAIN POSTING FORUM. => Topic started by: trace.3820 on September 13, 2020, 12:01:44 pm
-
Hello,
Newbie here from Cincinnati.
Started 2 hives this spring with a bunch of free deeps and supers. Noticed a lot of weird comb formation in the brood chambers. Should?ve probably figured this out earlier but oh well...
I just recently learned that some people run only 9 frames even in brood chambers and discovered that is the case with mine.
It looks like most folks who do that use removable spacers and leave most of the extra space on the ends, but my boxes have permanent metal frame spacers that distribute the space evenly so there is too much space between the frames I think.
Should I leave this alone til spring or try to fix it now? There is a lot of comb bridging between frames, it?s a hot mess.
Suggestions welcome.
Thanks,
Trace
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
-
9 frames is common in the honey supers above a queen excluder.
10 frames in the brood chamber(s), always.
You will need to look at what you have and figure out the optimum way to fix it.
Do not leave it. It will only get worse. Fix it. Yes it is going to be disruptive. Suit up, Grit your teeth, puff up your chest, grab a good sharp hive tool and get on with it.
Get a completely empty box that has no spacers in it. Go buy one if you need to. Bring an empty bucket and bread knife too for scraping wax and honey into. Remove all the hive boxes, bees and all, right down to the bottom board. Set the boxes on plywood or upturned lid on the ground beside the hive. Put the new box on the bottom board. Get on with transferring frames one at a time into the new box. Take a frame out of the old box. Shake the bees off of it into the bottom of the new box. Clean up burr comb and bridge comb and cut down fat sections. Place the frame into the box. Press frames tight together as you go, no extra space between frame shoulders. The frames are design for exact bee space. Also do not change the order or orientation of the frames as you transfer. So as to keep the brood nest in same organization as the bees have/want/put it. Make that 10th frame a full heavy honey frame. When the new box is full, one of your other boxes will be empty. Tear out the frame spacers. Scrape clean the box. Put it on top on the hive, and start transferring frames into it. Continue, repeat, continue until you are out of frames.
There may be a lot of bees flying, crawling, and running around. You may feel like your are making a royal mess. You are, just cleaning up what shouldnt be so stay focused and get her done. When all done, close up, clean up, and leave them alone undisturbed for 1 week. You will be amazed at how tidy they will have made things in there.
Hope that helps!
-
Welcome to Beemaster. :happy: At this point, heading into winter like we are, I'd leave it. Unless you have a big flow going on, which I doubt, the bees won't be able to fix the mess by redrawing straight comb. On top of that, you wouldn't want to risk damaging their brood and stores this late. Again, just not a lot of time to recover from an overhaul like that. Next spring, once your flow is on, you can tear anything apart you want to, and they'll fix it right up.
Edit: HP posted as I was posting. He is extremely experienced, so I would defer to his advice, but I am concerned about their ability to redraw. What are your thoughts on this, HP?
-
Welcome to Beemaster.
I would go with THP. Mainly because I expect that you will have a call goldenrod flow.
I bought out an apiary and ended up with lots of 9 frame metal spacer boxes thaT were in the brood chamber. It did not work out well for the bees and I have now pulled every one of those spacers out of the boxes. The spacers make it so that there is more than bee space between brood cells. You will have to remove every frame to do this. I recommend that you remove the spacers from spare boxes, move the frames to them, add a frame and put it back together.
Hope this helps.
Jim Altmiller
-
They will easily repair using resources within the hive, by trimming and relocating wax.
I am also assuming it is all drawn comb already and only bridging between frames. No extra wild combs of brood between frames. Even so, I would still proceed to fix it now, on a nice warm sunny fall day of course. If there is wild combs with brood, I would just toss it - call it varroa brood removal method if you wish -. On the balance of the whole, the hive will recover quickly and be way ahead no matter how disruptive the fix is.
If there is any foundation in the hive at this time, get that out of there ... or be feeding heavily to help the bees finish tidying those up.
-
Hi Trace,
I had what sounds like a similar issue last year with patchy comb on foundation and excess burr/bridge comb being built. Several forum members gave great advice and among them HP's worked perfectly. Without knowing if it's all of your frames that have comb issues or just some, it may work for you too. I see HP has chimed in on this post and I would love to hear his thoughts on this. In my case since my issue was primarily with 4 frames, I was able to pull them up into a super (I did it 2 at a time) that I added above and put a queen excluder between the brood chamber and super. This allowed the nurse bees to finish tending the brood in the offending frames above in the super until they emerged, then in a few weeks after all the brood had hatched, they began filling them with honey. I was goin to pull them ASAP but decided to let them fill them, then I pulled and harvested the honey and scraped all the wax down to the foundation to reuse later so the problem was remedied. This may work for you and allow all the brood to survive, however weather and cooler temps may work against you. I'm in a tropical climate so I am not accustomed to over-wintering hives to the same extent that most others are.
You can read my issue on the thread below. Jump to post #20 and read from there on to see how HP suggested and my follow up posts.
https://beemaster.com/forum/index.php?topic=53641.20
But, this may not be applicable in your case. Although if so, it may be less invasive if it can be used. I'll defer to others such as HP, Ben Framed, Sawdstmkr, but wanted to mention this and others can let you know if it's recommended or not.
-
I experimented with 9 frames in a 10 frame brood box and decided that I got the opposite result I was looking for. The comb was very uneven because honey will protrude a lot while brood does not. I eventually went to 11 frames in a 10 frame brood box and got much more even comb. I do often use less in the supers and space them out more to make them easier to uncap.
-
Well I took care of this today and it wasn?t as bad as I thought, it was only the top hive body that was 9 frames, the bottom one was 10. Lost some honey and a few bees, just hope I didn?t kill the queen they were quite angry and I had somewhat limited time to look around.
I used a bread knife to cut the capped honey even with the frames and moved them over into a box with no spacers. In retrospect maybe I should?ve just pulled those honey frames and put new ones in but I was worried it was too late in the season.
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk