Swarm cells?

[cjtinkle]

Sorry I ask so many questions, but ya'll always have all the answers! Are these swarm cells? http://www.tinkletimes.com/images/Farm/Bees/Drone-Cells.jpg
We hadn't been able to check our hives in a few weeks, and found these when we finally did. We added a super!


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[Branman]

That just looks like burr comb they used as cross comb to connect two frames. Swarm cells look like peanuts.

[cjtinkle]

Does it need to be scraped off? It was full of eggs... and we did, but we didn't take the top brood chamber off to scrape the connecting stuff on the bottom frames.

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[Scotty]

You can scrape it off, but they're just going to build it back again. They need some place to make drone brood...so if you don't mind you could just let them build it there. Unless you inspect quite often then it will become a bother.

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-Scotty

Weekly progress of my hive(s): http://bees.total-x.org

[oregonsparkie]

CJ,

If they need more room for brood, can you add another brood box??

[cjtinkle]

Well being a newb... don't you just add two hive deeps for brood chambers, then when those are full start adding supers? That's what we're doing. Also, we didn't add a queen excluder, it seems that half do and half don't, do we need to?

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[Michael Bush]

>If they need more room for brood, can you add another brood box??

Sure.

>Well being a newb... don't you just add two hive deeps for brood chambers, then when those are full start adding supers?

That's what some people do. It works well in most climates if you don't mind lifing the deeps. I just run all mediums and no excluder so they are all the same to me. If they queen needs room to lay, she has it. Some people in the South run one deep for a brood chamber and some in the North run three. But then some people in the far North wrap or overwinter inside in only one deep. I have never tried that small of a brood chamber for winter. The main thing for winter is not to run out of food. The main thing for a brood chamber (especially when using an excluder) is not to let it get too full of honey and pollen where the queen has nowhere to lay.

> That's what we're doing. Also, we didn't add a queen excluder, it seems that half do and half don't, do we need to?

As long as you're willing to accept that sometimes the queen will lay some brood somewhere else. Usually she's content with two deep brood chambers or three medium boxes.

The only frustrating part to me, when the queen lays in the supers, is that my triangular bee escape doesn't work at all if there is any brood in the supers. So if you're ever using an escape and the bees just won't leave, look for brood in the supers.

Also when you're exctracting you may find some brood and have to cut it out. Since I brush each frame after using the esacpe, I usually find it all and try to put it together so I can deal with it all at once.

When you're extracting you kind of want to get a rhythm and not have to adjust for surprises.

I don't use an excluder.