What are you trying to learn in keeping a long hive?

[Bob Wilson]

The things I am still working on are...
1. How to better open the broodnest in spring to prevent swarming.
2. How to keep the broodnest from backfilling and managing a long, French loaf bread shaped brood nest, stretching through 15 or more frames.
3. Whether 32 frames are enough for honey to cure, rather than having an entire 4 foot long hive full of uncapped nectar, and backfilling beginning again.
What about you other long hive/topbar/layens beeks?

[loisl58]

Yep, I have 2 long langstroth hives in Queensland Australia.  This year has been harder for me.
1) No queen twice.
2) Queen getting through when I took excluder out to clean it and setting up in honey frames.
3) Only a few frames fully capped most 3/4 capped. Jugggling frames around to get them capped.
4) Moving brood frames and honey frames so each type is together.

Love not having to lift boxes. Like having hives higher off the ground.
3rd Autumn/winter now have learned a heap and so mmuch more to learn.

[Bob Wilson]

Lois. I am right there with you. This is my 4th year.
I also am working to keep the brood nest to the entrance, and the nectar to the back. Perhaps it is because of the horizontal layout that the broodnest stretches through the hive, then the bees fill up an emerging capped brood frame with nectar, which essentially divides the broodnest into parts.
Maybe the layens hive avoids that because the frames are deeper.

[Michael Bush]

The Layens hive usually has more of a mixture of honey and brood because there is more room to put honey over the brood nest.  Feeding empty frames into the brood nest is the best solution to most of these issues.  Empty drawn comb is often backfilled immediately.  Empty foundationless or foundation will usually get laid up by the queen before they can backfill it when the cells aren't deep enough to backfill.

[Bob Wilson]

I see the queen laying up the new comb that way, Michael. But it seems (this year for some reason) that they are backfilling any empty comb but leaving the foundationless empty frames undrawn.
If a hive is making a new queen during a nectar flow, they tend to pack in more nectar. Do they ALSO ignore building new comb, since there is already empty comb to fill, and no need for new comb since there are no eggs or larva?

[Michael Bush]

Bees only build comb if they need it...