Regression questions for hives I'm buying.

[Ruben]

Hello everyone, I started out this year with two hives using starter strips with a goal of small cell colonies. I purchased 4 colonies of bees with help from "Curtis" here on beesource that I will be picking up in the morning. Two of them have one deep box and one shallow super which will need to have a super added to both tomorrow. My question is if I have plan to regress these hives to small cell what should I do as far as the supers tomorrow. I have med. supers and plenty of small cell and 7/11 foundation. Should I put starter strips or the 7/11 foundation in the med. supers? I don't plan on taking any honey from them this year and I was thinking I should use starter strips. Also does anyone know where I can read up on how to regress an existing colony to small cell? I started with it and it was easy but when I ran a search for converting an existing hive I did not find much? Thanks

[Rod Weakley]

If these supers you speak of are going to be used exclusively for honey, then it doesn't really matter what you put in them as far as small cell is concerned. Small cell is a concern in the brood nest. The center of the broodnest mostly. If you have the majority of your broodnest 4.9 mm then you are going to get the benefits. SO for the supers I would use what you think the bees will accept more quickly, and what you feel like extracting or crushstraining.

[Michael Bush]

The question of regressing an existing hive gets discussed about once a week.

The two main methods are the shakedown, where you shake them off of the large cell combs and start them like a swarm. Or a gradual feeding of small cell foundation (or foundationless frames) into the hive. I prefer the gradual method. It's easy enough to do without stressing them too much.

The concepts are simple. It's easy to pull empty frames and it's not hard on them, in a flow, to pull honey frames. It's brood that's the issue. So you keep pulling the frames of honey out of the brood nest and either putting them somewhere else and feeding in frames of small cell foundation, or pull them and harvest them. If you have an excluder and two brood boxes, you can always put one whole box of brood above the excluder to emerge and keep feeding in small cell combs below the excluder as you move frames of honey or capped brood up above to emerge. Eventually you have small cell comb in the brood nest.

[palikaji]

Is it too late in the season to feed in foundationless frames in brood nest for them to draw, cause I want honey to build up for winter?

[Michael Bush]

You can feed them in. It is late in the season to expect to get a lot of them drawn, but you can keep feeding one at a time in until they are drawn and then add another.

[wayacoyote]

Michael,
would feeding the bees as well cause them to keep drawing out frames? Or is it too late for that as well? We haven't had the brunt of our fall flow yet (which won't be much thanks to our drought).

Waya

[Michael Bush]

>would feeding the bees as well cause them to keep drawing out frames?

If there's no flow it will help a lot.

> Or is it too late for that as well?

Not here. The days are still hot and the bees are still working a flow.