Hive growth questions

[NeilV]

My hive seems to be growing exponentially. The cluster in my hive of Russian started out the year really little, and it is roughly doubling in size every 2 weeks or so, maybe faster. Right now there is a lot of capped brood, but not so much open brood. I figure some of the winter bees started dying and they may have all the brood they can cover right now. This is my first experience taking a hive out of winter and into spring, and I'm trying to get a feel for what is normal and what to expect.

My questions:

1. When one side of a frame of bees hatches out, can the resulting bees cover quite a lot more than one side of a frame of brood? Any idea how much more?

2. The brood nest is expanding up, but no so much out. When the brood nest expands to full size in a 10 frame box, how many frames should end up as brood frames? (In other words, when the hive expands to a reasonably decent size, how many frames of brood should there be in the box and how much should be devoted to pollen and honey). If that is a goofy question and the answer is "depends," can somebody give me some general rules/ideas about what is good/bad?

3. There still seems to be plenty of honey above the brood nest, and the bees are bringing in nectar and curing it in areas next to the brood nest. I have been feeding syrup in baggies, and they are taking some syrup but not much. Things are starting to bloom all over. Would it be safe to take the syrup off assuming no freezes or unexpected cold weather?

Thanks to all,

ndvan

[tecumseh]

ndvan writes:
My hive seems to be growing exponentially.

tecumseh suggest:
the hives growth should be fairly represented by a typical sigmoid growth curve and at that segment (at this time of year) of this growth curve that is described as increasing at an increasing rate. the 'appearance of growth' may be some what fuzzy by the effect of temperature on the cluster of live bees.

1. When one side of a frame of bees hatches out, can the resulting bees cover quite a lot more than one side of a frame of brood? Any idea how much more?
>one side of brood hatched out should be about 2500 bees which would likely cover two sides of one frame. again (as above) air temperture will confuse this simple question.

2. The brood nest is expanding up, but no so much out. When the brood nest expands to full size in a 10 frame box, how many frames should end up as brood frames? (In other words, when the hive expands to a reasonably decent size, how many frames of brood should there be in the box and how much should be devoted to pollen and honey). If that is a goofy question and the answer is "depends," can somebody give me some general rules/ideas about what is good/bad?
>one deep and one shallow should be about all the brood area a single queen can manage. it sounds like you need to move the brood downward and encourage the queen to move horizontally.

3. There still seems to be plenty of honey above the brood nest, and the bees are bringing in nectar and curing it in areas next to the brood nest. I have been feeding syrup in baggies, and they are taking some syrup but not much. Things are starting to bloom all over. Would it be safe to take the syrup off assuming no freezes or unexpected cold weather?
>with feed in the box (and how much is enought is an even larger problem) you can likely stop feeding. I would... unless I had some 'other' purpose for this hive.

[NeilV]

Thanks,

My hive consists of three mediums. She laid in about 3-4 frames in the bottom box and then moved up and has laid in 2 in the middle box. She was in the middle box when I looked in there on Tuesday.

If it does not rain too much this weekend, I may move the queen and the frames of brood from the middle box down into the bottom box and see if I can get a wider brood area. It seems like last year this queen was prone to want to build a tall, skinny brood nest and some of the outside frames were not used at all.

I hope to requeen this a little later too.

ndvan

[tecumseh]

I am not certain if it is genetic or situation (the hive's internal condition) but some queens seem to like to brood up horizontallly and some seem determined to lay a thin pattern all the way to the top of the box. Doing what you described does seem to at least partiall...at least temporarily... remedy the concerns of having a queen in the box that lays down brood vertically.