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tkwinston4

Field Bee
Joined
Mar 9, 2009
Messages
535
Reaction score
1
Location
WBC/Smith/National/nucs in Horsham, West Sussex.
Hive Type
Smith
Number of Hives
7
Hi guys

A friend has raised the following questions and i wonder if you would be good enough to answer them for her?

1) When renewing the Brood comb and replacing with undrawn, - how do you get the comb cleaned out ? e.g. if it is brood in it, and stores ? You can't place it up with the supers for them to hatch, as it is too big ?

2) As I have split my hive into two - I now have a Queen Cell hatching out.(Fingers crossed) - I will know her age when she appears. But my Old Queen now on the old site in a new brood box I do not know how old she is because she swarmed into my hive. Will she just die of old age and possibly not leave a new Queen.? Or what will/should happen about her.
I will check to see what is happening in there since I split/moved her onto new box on 5th May.

Oh Yes No 3........... in my hive there are shallows with stores in it - how will I know if it is SUGAR SYRUP they stored - or do they do a miracle with it and turn the water into the wine! or rather turn it to Honey ?

Hope they all make sense :)
 
1) Gradually move the old comb to the edge of the box. If you get all of the old comb in the outer three frames or so, then as the brood nest starts to reduce in size later in the year, you can just pull them out and extract the stores. Don't move brood fully away from the nest separated (say) by foundation. Just swap frames around until the newer frames are in the middle. Watch for frames colliding as you put them back.

2) If the old queen is laying workers, then don't worry. If she is laying drones, then she needs to be replaced. Bees will generally know when she is failing and supercede with a new queen.

3) Depends when you put the syrup on! Apparently you can test the pH of the stores - honey is quite acidic, sugar is pretty neutral. Not sure about this.
 
As above and can I urge some reading of a good bee book to help you.

PH
 
1) Gradually move the old comb to the edge of the box. .

In the edge of box bees store valuable pollen in combs.

The best way is that that you use one brood box as super. When old comb is full of larvae, the pollen is consumed away and bees fill comb with honey.
After extracting take olf frame off.


That helps in swarming too.
When you move brood combs over exgluder, it is one swarming preventing method.
 

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