Getting Stores Into The Brood Box

[rae]

It would appear that my bees have not been reading their books again.

About 4 or our hives had part-filled / uncapped supers at the inspection last week, and very light brood boxes. Given that we want to get the hive volume down for winter, it would be better if the stores were in the brood box. There is a fair amount of space in there, the brood nests are contracting as expected. We also have some OSR "gone hard" that we need to feed back.

No problem we thought, stick the supers under the broods and they will take it all up.

So when we looked yesterday, had they done what was expected? Not at all, the supers under the broods are now full, and they are busy capping them. The broods are still light.

Can bees not read? Or will this happen when it gets a little bit colder and they actually start to consider the looming winter?

In terms of forage, we are at the end of a thumping HB flow, and the Ivy is revving up. Honey was removed at the end of July, and they have kept everything since then.

 

[Erichalfbee]

2 of mine are in a similar situation. Looking back I put a half filled super under a colony on 5th Sept last year and it was all moved up in a couple of days.
There is heather on the fells a mile away and the weather has not been too bad so that's the explanation. I'm leaving mine, feeding little and hoping it will all be gone by spring. Look out for lots of pale cappings on the floor underneath.
We have a week of bad weather forecast so maybe they'll eat it then.

 

[Mike a]

Try placing the super above a crown board with access hole.
Same method works for cleaning wet frames after extraction.

My understanding of why this method works is the colony consider the super to be outside of their hive and they will clean the super out and move any stores down.

 

[Juststarting]

Try placing the super above a crown board with access hole.
Same method works for cleaning wet frames after extraction.

My understanding of why this method works is the colony consider the super to be outside of their hive and they will clean the super out and move any stores down.

I'm really interested in this thread as I have the same problem of trying to get stores into the BB rather than supers which I really want to remove.

Mike, I have tried your suggestion but even above the crownboard they continued to put stores into rather than in BB which had empty cells/frames as laying was contracting.

Is it just a matter of timing ?

I had delayed apiguarding two hives in the hope they would move stores so that I could remove the supers or cap them so I could extract. Unfortunately they have done neither so I am now thinking of clearing them from the supers and treating and then retrying putting them back above the crownboard.

Would this be the best approach?

 

[Monsieur Abeille]

Juststarting - have you tried bruising the cappings, can help get into the bees minds that they need to do something with them.

Mind you I have one colony which has read the book and moves them down nicely while another just seems to fanny about

 

[Juststarting]

M A - unfortunately it not capped - I would have extracted it if I could!

 

[YorkshireBees]

As mentioned in another thread I am having a similar experience. Placed extracted supers above crownboard with feed hole open and instead of cleaning them they are filling them with nectar! I put it down to a number of reasons.

Despite the contracting brood size there are still a lot of bees in the colony and this combined with a good flow (in my case Balsam) and relatively good weather seems to convince the bees that there is still time / forage to fill a super and the brood box!

Either that or they are just tormenting me!

I will leave it a week (have to as will be away working) and see if the predicted bad weather convinces them otherwise.

 

[Rich0909]

I had the same problem but managed to solve it by reducing the hole in the crown board down to just a couple of bees spaces, they then cleaned the supers down nicely.

Richard

 

[YorkshireBees]

I had the same problem but managed to solve it by reducing the hole in the crown board down to just a couple of bees spaces, they then cleaned the supers down nicely.

Richard

Good idea may try that later, although the way it is raining at the moment may delay my attempts!

 

[Erichalfbee]

Yes, sounds as if it might work.
Let us know how you get on.

 

[nelletap]

This answer may be at a tangent. I am involved in a project and we have been joined by Elvis - not the Elvis but a man who seems to have kept bees in lots of places in the world over the last 20 years. He is improving his English. We were trying to feed our colonies, both from swarms this year and the one had a shaky start. We were concerned that they needed to build up stores. When we had problems with the feeder, Elvis showed us how to poor our syrup over the brood frame and encourage it to go inside each cell by slightly tiling the frame. Not sure whether this will encourage the bees to store in the brood frame or not but they seemed very happy. Needs to be warm enough to do this as the frame might be outside the brood box for slightly longer than with a straightforward inspection.

 

[rae]

Interesting that other people's bees can't read either.

A fair number of these supers originated from wet supers that were put on top of the crownboard for cleaning - and were promptly filled with nectar. I might try the "very small hole approach" next year, but for the moment I am inclined to leave the broods high as they tend to naturally fill from the top down.

Perhaps a bit of cooler weather will encourage them...

 

[astabada]

This may be pretty naive, but what I'd do to prevent the queen laying in the super next year is to place the queen excluder under the brood box, above the super.

This will prevent her laying in the super, but don't know if can create other problems, any experts advice here?

 

[Erichalfbee]

Perhaps for the same reason you wouldn't leave the excluder on if the super was above the brood box?