Back to single brood from double shallows

[Bumble]

I've tried one colony on double shallows this year. It seemed a good idea at the time, but I don't like it at all although the bees don't seem too bothered by it. Today's inspection showed that they've almost completely filled the upper box with stores, but each frame except the outermost two has a area of brood which is continued on the lower frame. The lower part of the frames in the bottom box is completely empty. I don't like the way the brood is spread in quite a shallow strip across both boxes instead of being more ball-shaped and towards the centre. This is a marked queen that swarmed from one of my own hives.

They're Swienty (Paynes) poly lang supers, which take dadant depth frames. Nine frames per box.

This colony is the only one I've moved to heather, which is only just now producing nectar. I don't want to lose any crop that comes in, although I suspect there won't be much because there was a prolonged hot and dry spell at just the wrong time. There's very little action in the supers, so it looks as if they've concentrated on filling the frames within the brood area.

Would it be too risky to put a brood box (jumbo lang/dadant frames) containing new foundation beneath these boxes as soon as I've taken off the honey and started feeding, or should I leave it until next year? By doing this the shallow boxes would be further from the open mesh floor, which I thought might persuade them to centralise the brood area in the middle frames of these boxes.

I do have some of this year's newly drawn frames that I've taken from a drone laying cast swarm which I combined with a larger colony. Could I keep those and use them, whenever it's done, instead of melting them down?

What else could I do, and what questions haven't I thought of?

[The Drone Ranger]

Hi Bumble
Putting foundation below the broodnest is not likely to work they are not using the bottom of the existing frames
Queens don't like to cross honey stores to continue the brood nest (so above might not work without other adjustments)
OMF slow colony development according to SBA research published in the magazine solid floors are best
Drawn comb is much better than foundation if you have it
I think it's too late in the season to expect them to draw a broodbox of foundation and give a heather honey crop
I might be wrong best of luck with it :)

[prakel]

OMF slow colony development according to SBA research published in the magazine solid floors are best

Hi DR, do you have a reference for that research?

[The Drone Ranger]

Hi DR, do you have a reference for that research?

Recently in the SBA magazine
Best place to look is P184 which is in the July 2013 magazine (the page numbering starts in Mag one of each year I think)
The reason is the original article was misprinted showing no difference
The correction was printed on the Letters page
By
Magnus Peterson and Rob McGowan
Its not a very big study but fairly convincing
In actual fact they were looking at bee deaths so I'm inaccurate in saying slows development
They say they conclude " the use of open mesh floors is associated with a raised level of bee loss from the Winter cluster"
And I believe they intend to study this further

[prakel]

....And I believe they intend to study this further

Lets hope so, for general interest's sake, but I expect it'll be much the same as this business about feed holes/top ventilation -over all probably (in my opinion) not making much, if any, difference to the year end results. I think that we can get too tied up with spotlighting certain narrow time periods instead of watching performance over the entire year.

[Bumble]

OMF slow colony development according to SBA research published in the magazine solid floors are best
I've never used solid floors. They don't usually attach comb to the bottom bars, so the lowest part of normal sized brood frames isn't used. I've assumed it was because of the size of the brood frames rather than because of the open mesh floor. I have limited experience of wooden hives coupled with open mesh floors, but they did seem to leave more lower comb unused. I got rid of the boxes and moved the bees into poly! The swienty floors have something resembling a central sump rather than being flat, and have a smaller area of mesh floor than in any home-made national floors I've seen.


Putting foundation below the broodnest is not likely to work they are not using the bottom of the existing frames
Queens don't like to cross honey stores to continue the brood nest (so above might not work without other adjustments)
Ah, yes. So if I put the brood box above? Is that courting disaster, more so than the current situation? I could do it next week.

I could remove the supers, but nothing's capped. Replacing them above, or above a feeder board, would make a massive stack which would probably attract attention.


Drawn comb is much better than foundation if you have it
I think it's too late in the season to expect them to draw a broodbox of foundation and give a heather honey crop
And if I ignore the issue of the heather crop?

I've got eight drawn but empty frames I could use, so only one less than a full complement. I could, instead, swap out frames containing stores from other colonies. I only put 9 in the boxes because 10 +propolis is a bit tight.

Any other idea will be gratefully received.

I feel a bit like Worzel Gummidge, as if I haven't got my thinking head on!

[The Drone Ranger]

Sorry Bumble
I'm not being much help
How about taking out the queen excluder
the brood nest will expand upwards if it needs to
You might be able to re-arrange the frames with brood and the ones with honey to reshape the broodnest
Because the super frames are all the same size you can shuffle things around a bit
After the heather there should be frames with honey and no brood which you can take

When you bring the bees back from the heather you can re-arrange the brood frames again hopefully into 1 super
Then put your drawn comb in a broodbox over the super with the brood
You will be feeding for winter by that time and the bees will store that syrup in the broodbox
That will bring the queen into the broodbox to lay

[Bumble]

I'm not being much help
Yes you are! :)



When you bring the bees back from the heather you can re-arrange the brood frames again hopefully into 1 super
Then put your drawn comb in a broodbox over the super with the brood
You will be feeding for winter by that time and the bees will store that syrup in the broodbox
That will bring the queen into the broodbox to lay
I think that might be best. I'll assess things again next time I'm there, but I don't think anything will have changed much.

[Floyd]

I have gone back to solid floor albeit an OMF with a removable floor so that I can still monitor for Varroa just incase it arrives.

The difference coming out of winter was two fold.