RE: Moving Bees to New Hive

[Robin]

Thanks, Clint for your response. What I forgot to say was that the frames in the old hive are also decrepit (bent and dark.) The bees are trying to use them and have brood in a few of them. We have new frames in our new hive, and want to introduce this colony to it. How many of the old frames should we try out in the new hive, if any? Are we just going to have to sacrifice all the brood?

[clintonbemrose]

If it were me I would put the new box with frames and new foundation on top of the old box and wait for the bees to pull the new foundation and the queen to move up. Then after the brood had hatched out remove the lower bad box and frames. To do this you will need to feed the bees 1 to 1 syrup and lightly spray syrup on the foundation to start the process.
Clint

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Clinton Bemrose
just South of Lansing Michigan

[Michael Bush]

if the frames are sound (not falling apart) but warped, you could, if they aren't burred up too badly, put some of them in the new hive box to bait them up. If you can get 10 frames total out of the current hive, either as honey that you can get rid of a whole box. You can set aside or extract the honey. You can put the brood on the outsides of the new boxes, then you will get them to move up more quickly. If you have the brood on the outsides they will want to move the nest to the middle and will eventually fill the brood combs on the outside with honey and then you can steal those.

[odfrank]

I am vacating bad boxes by turning them upside down and then placing new combs above them. The bees don't like upside down combs.

[Michael Bush]

>I am vacating bad boxes by turning them upside down and then placing new combs above them. The bees don't like upside down combs.

That is true. The brood will still emerge, but the bees will stop using the combs because they slope the wrong way.

I've done this and sometimes it works really well. Sometimes they actually rework the comb. http://www.beesource.com/ubb/smile.gif

You could also flip the bottom one upside down and put a frame of brood up in the new box, smoke and drum them up into the box (smoke very heavily and tap rythmically on the side of the box) and then put an excluder between the boxes so the queen stays in the top and remove the bottom box after all the brood emerges.