Hengest
New Bee
- Joined
- Aug 27, 2013
- Messages
- 24
- Reaction score
- 0
- Location
- Wiltshire
- Hive Type
- National
- Number of Hives
- 1
Hi all - slightly panicky post so apologies for that
I had my first look in my hive yesterday evening. It was heaving. Bees all over the two supers that are on it and what looked like 9 seams of bees in the brood box. I took the central two frames out and put them in another brood box , with the rest of the space filled with foundation and I closed up the gap in the first brood box box and put two frames of foundation in towards the edge. Then put the box with two fames of brood on the top of the original brood box. I must confess I didn't go through all the frames as I was getting a little anxious . There were more bees than I'd ever seen in a hive before.
I want to do the job properly at the weekend - temperatures permitting - change the floor and scrape all the bracecomb back and have a thorough inspection.
I was quite surprised to see brood in the bracecomb - is that normal?
For some reason it hasn't occurred to me that it could be used for this. Does this comb just get removed and the larvae perish? The hive looks quite stuck together and there were quite a few queen cups including some in the bracecomb though none appeared to be charged from my frankly cursory inspection.
I can get my head around scraping the tops of bars, the cover board and the Queen excluder.
How do you go about scraping the bottom of frames? Never had to do this in the branch apiary.
Is any other remedial action necessary -? as in some of the frames move en masse when I was closing them up again and they are obviously stuck together. If they are still stuck together after scraping back how do you separate them?
Lots of questions so sorry about that but any advice would be gratefully received.
I had my first look in my hive yesterday evening. It was heaving. Bees all over the two supers that are on it and what looked like 9 seams of bees in the brood box. I took the central two frames out and put them in another brood box , with the rest of the space filled with foundation and I closed up the gap in the first brood box box and put two frames of foundation in towards the edge. Then put the box with two fames of brood on the top of the original brood box. I must confess I didn't go through all the frames as I was getting a little anxious . There were more bees than I'd ever seen in a hive before.
I want to do the job properly at the weekend - temperatures permitting - change the floor and scrape all the bracecomb back and have a thorough inspection.
I was quite surprised to see brood in the bracecomb - is that normal?
For some reason it hasn't occurred to me that it could be used for this. Does this comb just get removed and the larvae perish? The hive looks quite stuck together and there were quite a few queen cups including some in the bracecomb though none appeared to be charged from my frankly cursory inspection.
I can get my head around scraping the tops of bars, the cover board and the Queen excluder.
How do you go about scraping the bottom of frames? Never had to do this in the branch apiary.
Is any other remedial action necessary -? as in some of the frames move en masse when I was closing them up again and they are obviously stuck together. If they are still stuck together after scraping back how do you separate them?
Lots of questions so sorry about that but any advice would be gratefully received.