I wouldn't do a bailey change anyway ,,, the kindest way is to simply remove a couple of frames at either end of the brood box and insert two new frames either side of the brood nest, they will draw them out very quickly as, when the colony starts to expand in Spring, they will draw the frames out - because they NEED them. Each week do the same again ,.. over the season you will have changed all the frames you want to without stressing the bees - Because, making them (or trying to make them) draw out all those frames is going to stress them. That's not low impact beekeeping. I would not be entertaining any manipulations until spring has firmly sprung as you can then use their natural desire to expand the colony to your advantage. Work WITH the bees ...
I'm a low interference beekeeper but you do need to inspect ... inspections are not about chasing the queen - they are about looking for queen cells, signs of disease, checking for BIAS and whether they have enough stores for the next couple of weeks.,
You don't need to take every frame out .. you can ignore frames of stores and a quick look at the brood frames will tell you all you need to know.
Personally ... it's a load of cobblers this incessant desire to change frames - some of my colonies have frames that are 7 or 8 years old and more .. the bees still use them - if they didn't like them they would take them down and rebuild them - but I don't see that happening en-masse. If you have not had disease in your colonies there's no real need to change brood frames until they really do become unserviceable ..
I don’t agree with the view that combs doesn’t need changing and leaving it black or dark brown is ok. There is research that has proven the benefits of changing comb regularly. I do agree this has to be done in a common sense way - with your eyes ie change when darker brown, I think generally changing every 3 years is good advice
The honey bees (Apis mellifera L.) mainly use beeswax (comb) for brood rearing and food storage. Changes in the color and cell dimensions occur due to repeated food storage and brood rearing in the comb. The study aimed to determine the changes in comb cell measurements and worker body sizes in...
journals.plos.org
Here’s an except from research that I heard about last week when watching a Bibba zoom session on changing comb
“Comb age had negative effects on the cell diameter, cell depth, cell volume, cell honey or pollen capacity, and newly emerged worker body weight. Significant negative correlations were observed between the accumulated substances in a cell and the cell diameter, cell depth, and cell size, while significant positive correlations were observed among the cell volume, cell diameter, cell depth, cell honey capacity, cell pollen capacity, and worker body weight. It can be concluded that the dimensions of the comb cells and worker body size changed with the age of the comb. The obtained results recommend beekeepers to replace combs aged more than 3 years with a new comb to allow large workers to gather more nectar and pollen, rear a larger brood, and store more honey.“
I’ve done a Bailey comb change a couple of times - to change comb on colonies I bought at auction when expanding and wasn’t happy with the combs. Worked well at the time. Colonies bombed away afterwards. However now, I change a third of combs approx every year, targeting the darkest combs; as others have said moving to the edge of boxes first
Theoretically the idea would be sound but I wonder how many years this wax would have to be in use for such an issue to occur,
