Just too see what happended - I did

[spunky]

I had a deep hive body of smaller cell ( this was from some Fatmans bees last year ) and I just supered a hive of Russian hybrids from Walter T kellys to see what would happen. The queen just moved up into the deep and started laying away, workers capped the cells and didnt miss a beat.


I gotta say I was much more impressed with my queen this year from Walter T kellys, a big and fat one, also I would have thought alot of the worker bees would be lighter in color, as in just tossing in some italian worker bees in with the russian x queen. Alot of the worker bees in the package were very dark.

[beemandan]

I'm not sure I understand. I believe that you took a deep with drawn 'smaller' cell comb and placed it on top of a hive started with Kelley's hybrids. Is that right?
How small is 'smaller' cell?
What did you do with the queen from fatbeeman's box?
You were 'much more impressed' with the queen from Kelleys than what? Fatbeeman's queen?
I'm just trying to understand.

[spunky]

I had a deep hive body of drawn comb of small cell that I placed over the the package of kelly bees. The comb was from an 07' hive that died out this winter.


sorry my sentence structure stinks ????


Nothing the matter with Don's bees; fine upstanding beekeeper.


I posted this because, I have heard, that some people talk about regression and having problems with the bees going from larger brood comb to smaller.

[hummingberd]

The problem I have had with cell regression has been:

1) Sometimes the bees build wonky cells and don't draw the comb out "correctly"

2) a bee that came from Large Cell (5.4) will not draw a cell that is 4.9 or smaller. You have to go through a few different sheets of foundation to finally get to small cell. This takes a lot of time in the hive to look at the cells, measure them, and then replace them. On top of that it takes time for the bees to draw out the comb. Time they could be using to make honey! hehe.

3) I have found as of late, that the bees really need someplace to build drone comb. I am assuming that small cell drone comb cells are still smaller than large cell drone comb cells, but of course the drone cells are larger than the worker cells. I end up with these weird cells that look like kix (the cereal) So, I have been using small cell and giving the girls an empty frame to build their own comb. So far so good. :)