(another) Regression Question

[Doug R]

I have: two hives with three medium brood supers all on regular plasticell.

Question 1:
When I add 4.9, should I checkerboard it with the plasticell or pull an entire super and add an entire super of 4.9?

Question 2:
Is drone cell size the same for small bees and large bees? In other words, I have some drone foundation, will the bees use it for drones or not?

Question 3:
Maybe I missed this somewhere: When treating with Oxallic acid, does the queen need to be pulled? Is it okay to treat with brood on? Is it okay to treat with honey supers on?

Thanks,

Doug

[Michael Bush]

>Question 1:
When I add 4.9, should I checkerboard it with the plasticell or pull an entire super and add an entire super of 4.9?

"Checkerboarding" is a term to describe what is done over the brood nest, not in the brood nest. If by, checkerboarding you mean every other frame is 4.9mm foundation, no. You'll spread the brood out way too far. Feed one into a medium strength hive and maybe two into one box of a brood nest on a strong hive.

>Question 2:
Is drone cell size the same for small bees and large bees? In other words, I have some drone foundation, will the bees use it for drones or not?

Natural drone cells vary greatly. I would let them build their own drone because you want some of those small (5.9mm) drones to outfly the other bees' drones. smile.gif But the queen will lay in the 6.6mm drone cells.


Question 3:
Maybe I missed this somewhere: When treating with Oxallic acid, does the queen need to be pulled? Is it okay to treat with brood on? Is it okay to treat with honey supers on?

[Doug R]

>Feed one into a medium strength hive and maybe two into one box of a brood nest on a strong hive.

One frame next to nicely drawn out comb will probably be drawn out quite well, two frames of foundation is a potential mess, is it not?

Any thoughts on question three?

Thanks,

Doug

[Michael Bush]

Sorry, got distracted...

>Maybe I missed this somewhere: When treating with Oxallic acid, does the queen need to be pulled?

No.

> Is it okay to treat with brood on?

It's hard on them, but it can be done.

> Is it okay to treat with honey supers on?

This is controversial. I wouldn't.

>One frame next to nicely drawn out comb will probably be drawn out quite well, two frames of foundation is a potential mess, is it not?

A whole box of foundation is usually drawn well. Two together is fine, except if you're putting a gap that big in the brood nest it is too stressful.

[3pepper]

what if you messed up before finding this post and alternated new frame and brood frame and took the ones you removed and did the same for another deep and set that on top of the original deep . you said that would spread out the brood way to far .
what would happen ??? would the hive be set back , or die out , or would they leave ?

[PA Pete]

Unless you have a lot of bees in the hive, you won't have enough to cover the new doubled area of brood. You would likely end up losing brood due to chilling, if they decided to shift to one side of the new bigger brood nest, and no longer covered (and temperature-regulated) the other end of the brood nest. If this happened and you lost brood due to chilling, yes, this would set the hive back, because you just lost a bunch of potential new bees, and now the house bees also have extra work cleaning them out. At least that's what I understand would happen.

If your weather's warm, there's probably less risk of losing brood due to chilling, but you've still stressed the bees by breaking up their brood chamber so much - they would probably take some time to recover and get back to their old reproduction pace.

Take this with a grain of salt - I've never done this so I don't know first-hand.

Good luck!

[3pepper]

thanks pete
i made the big goof . it's 85 day time temp , 70 at night . hopefully they will not suffer to much loss . how long should i wait for the next inspection ? i plan to replace the 5 remaining plastic frames in each of the two deeps . should i wait until all the comb is drawn out on the new frames ? and only replace half at a time ? i wanted to move the plastic frames with brood to a top bar hive and replace them with empty frames . once i am all on natural comb , i will split the hive in two , one deep and one shallow each .
is this realistic .
thenks
3p