Brood upper hive body

[cookstove]

Brood in upper hive body , was pulling comb and storing , new hive started june 6th . should I reverse bodies ? Other hive only bottom has brrod . lost in this . please advise .

[gmcharlie]

assuming you don't mean a super, just leave it. Its not a problem if they are in teh upper instead of the lower....

Resist the temptation to meddle to much....

[GRIMBEE]

In one of my hives the queen lays in both deeps and 1 medium super, shes a powerhouse when it comes to egg laying. If you want to keep her in the bottom use a queen excluder.:thumbsup:

[beyondthesidewalks]

Resist the temptation to meddle to much....

That is really good advice. Assuming you've got two hive bodies and no supers, leave them alone as long as they've got room. Have they drawn out all of their comb? Any guesses as to what percentage of drawn comb is pollen, honey and brood? Are they actively drawing comb? Do you see much coming and going on the landing board? Are they bringing in some pollen? What does the brood pattern look like?

It's hard to advise without answers to all of these questions.

[bnatural]

Early on I used to swap boxes and move bees around according to the books. With three deeps for brood, it was a lot of work. Over the years I have abandoned that approach. The vast majority of the time the bees move themselves, their brood and their stores around just fine without any intervention from me. The only thing I routinely do these days is move a couple of frames of brood up into a box of undrawn foundation to get the bees up into that new box. At peak time, like now, good queens are laying across all three deeps. Come fall, they get pushed down into the bottom deep as the workers backfill the brood area with honey from the top down. They eat their way up during the winter, but then move back down once the warm weather arrives. I figure they can read the environmental signals better than I can.

I guess my caveat would be if you use a configuration, where they are cramped for space. Then, all bets are off.

Bill

[alpha6]

With two hives you should be meddling all the time. It won't hurt your bees to be learning about them as much as you can.

As for the brood boxes, yes you can switch them with no problem. I would go one step further after switching them by moving the two outermost frames of brood from the now bottom brood box (which was on top before you switched them) and place those into the center of the broodless top box. This will force the bees to move up and they will fill out the two empties you placed in the bottom box. You want the hive to build up as much as possible, the more space you give them the bigger they will get. If that means moving around the boxes and frames to speed this up then do it.

[gmcharlie]

Alpha, I would differentate between observing and meddeling.... by all means open and look and think, ask questions..... But I recomend you don't keep changing what the bees are doing until your sure there is a reason to change it...

[alpha6]

Roger that GM...I get enough meddling from my inlaws. :doh:

[beyondthesidewalks]

Alpha, I would differentate between observing and meddeling.... by all means open and look and think, ask questions..... But I recomend you don't keep changing what the bees are doing until your sure there is a reason to change it...

I agree. That's a great distinction but if you open your hive everyday, you do set them back a bit. That's what I did when I started out and I couldn't understand why my bees didn't produce much honey in the backyard. My bees on my acreage did great. Only difference was I didn't open up the bees and look at them everyday on the acreage. If you want lots of honey leave them alone and let them work. If you want to learn, open them up and look.

[mythomane]

I think it was Imirie who said that most bee problems were caused by operator error. You need to learn, sure, but if you go in more than once a week you take the heart out of them. My hives have always done best when I let them do the work and use a light hand. Leave them alone as much as you can. Reversing is a matter of choice. Many do not do it and do fine. So again for the reverse.