Free comb hanging from an OMF being used as a roof on a brood box with a brood of frames underneath... where to go from here?!

[ellypatt]

Hello,

I've been lurking here for a while. I started beekeeping last year when my mother asked me to help her, because her arthritis was making it hard to lift the boxes. She's had bees for a few years now after we got her a nuc for her 60th birthday (we did check she wanted them first! and she went on a beginners' course.)

Anyway *deep breath* last year I was inspecting one of her hives, which was on brood and a half and had a few queen cells. I found a nice big one in the half which I had put to one side, and was checking and removing others from the main brood box. (They original queen had already swarmed at this point). When I went back to the super about ten mins later the new queen had emerged and I had no idea where she was, so I put everything back together and left them in peace, hoping for the best.

Weeks went by, and we checked regularly for signs of her, but no eggs. The colony was starting to look smaller and less purposeful, so we decided to unite them with a queen-right hive. Having got it all sorted and united, I went back to the original hive site just to have a look... and found our missing queen She must've fallen from the super and crawled to the hive, and instead of going indoors had taken up residence on the underside of the OMF, where there was now a thriving, foot-ball sized colony on free comb (both + ) . I hastily bunged it in a brood box, with the OMF as a lid, and retrieved the (very pissed off) bees that I'd moved to unite and put their brood box underneath on a new floor. Then I went home to tell my mother how well I was doing.

They seemed quite happy with this arrangement and have overwintered well, so far, in a colony that looks like this (nationals):

Lid
Crown board
OMF (with comb hanging from it)
Brood box (with comb hanging in it)
Brood box
Solid floor​

So my question now is how to get them off the free comb and get back to a decent set up?! I am not keen to mess about with cutting out the comb and reframing it, and was wondering about adding additional space (when it's needed) to the bottom on the hive (like a warre), in the hope that as the comb moves up and the bees move down it will be used as a super and can eventually be removed...

Any help/ideas/input gratefully received.

 

[drstitson]

how many combs do they now have and how many seams of bees?

unless lucky enough to find HM laying in bottom box....

if they are strong colony perhaps best thing would be to do a shook swarm type approach into the bottom box once we get over the cold spell thats due any moment.

shake what you can into the box and then cut out and shake individual combs.

once all done discard the comb and brood.

 

[RoofTops]

I would probably go for the shook swarm but given your relative lack of experience it could be a very daunting task and the likelyhood of the queen getting squashed in the process is higher than I would be comfortable with.

Thinking on my feet (sitting down actually but let's not let details ruin a good metaphor) I think it would be worth looking at a Bailley frame change. Of course there is the small matter of the OMF in the way but depending on what sort of mesh it is you could either take a drill if it's XPM and drill lots of holes, each say 8 or 9mm in diameter in lines between the combs. If the mesh is a woven sheet then you could use a Marlin spike or something similar to "wangle*" larger holes in the mesh so the bees can migrate upwards into a new brood box of foundation you could place over them once it gets to say mid-April. Feed them 50:50 syrup at the same time to help them draw out the wax.

A simplified appraoch would of course be just to turn the whole mess upsidedown and then put the new broodbox of foundation on top. Whether this would work would depend on how stable the combs are as you would not want it all collapsing and crushing the queen. However, with their world inverted they would probably be encouraged to move upards more quickly.

More details on Bailly frame changes available elsewhere on the Forum if you search.

*technical rope making term

 

[ellypatt]

Thanks for the feedback. I will read up on bailey changes and shook swarms and wait for the weather to improve (8C and heavy sleet here today). There are about ten combs but I haven't looked closely at how many seams of bees. When I last had a peep by lifting the top brood box (so looking in the middle) they were using both the comb and the brood frames below (it was on a warm day and they were pretty active). The wire mesh already has one sizeable hole it that I snipped out with wire cutters so could feed them in the autumn