Bees not drawing comb on new foundation.

[Kathyp]

they are a source of protein.  quite a prize in some places.

http://www.thaiguidetothailand.com/exotic-food/eating-bugs-bees-nests-bee-larvae/

sometimes the queen will lay in the honey supers.  i find that if i let the bees store honey over the brood nest first then put my honey supers on, the queen rarely crossed to honey to lay above.  if she does, eventually that brood will hatch out and the bees will backfill with honey. 

[tillie]

My take on it is "who am I to decide where the queen needs to be in the hive?  If she needs to lay eggs in what I have deemed a honey super, then she must need to be there - for space, for spacing, for community, for inspiration - it doesn't matter why she is there, but she obviously needs to be there.

If I were a commercial beek, I might think differently, but as a hobbyist, I can pick and choose the frames I harvest and if the queen has chosen a frame I designated as a honey frame to use as a brood frame, more power to her. I just leave it in the hive and don't harvest it (haven't developed kathyp's cannibalistic tastes yet  :evil:)

It must be what the queen in her natural instinct sees fit to do and I celebrate!

Linda T

[Brian D. Bray]

Hi everyone! I have to first off thank you all for your help. I usually find myself reading for hours (something I should avoid but you are all so knowledgeable).

My newbee Q: If You dont use a queen excluder dont you end up with eggs/ brood in the honey super? And stuff in the honey? euww.

Depends on several factors.  A queen might go into a honey super to lay eggs if she finds the available brood chamber too small or back filled with honey (honeybound).   But in any case once any brood is hatched and the cells subsequently filled with honey the "gunk" one might find is usually filtered out during the extracting through bottling stages.  I've never found it to be a problem since any brood reared above the normal brood chamber is long hatched after mid-summer when the hive hits it apex point of growth.