Need advice on neglected hive

[Piedmont NC]

To bring back a neglected hive into a manageable condition, what do you do when you have a lot of burr comb in the top of the hive?


Background:

My wife and I were asked to mentor a young man who just finished a bee course and has a hive on his family's property. The hive was abandoned by the previous owners and hasn't been worked in a couple years. The hive consists of a solid bottom board, a deep hive body, two shallow supers, a queen excluder, and telescoping cover. When we went to inspect the hive, we had to pry off the top. With the top came a mountain of comb stuck to the queen excluder which was stuck inside the top. The top super was full of comb mostly with honey and some brood, but no frames. From what we could tell with our hive tool, the lower super doesn't have any frames either - just comb. From a rotted corner on the deep hive body, we could see a frame. So we are assuming there are frames in the deep. The hive is very active with lots of bees and looks like a very strong hive. No signs of SHB, wax moths, or disease at this point. No varroa on the drone brood. This was our initial inspection to see what we were dealing with and what needed to be done to get it back into a manageable condition for the young man.

We removed the mountain of comb off the top, separating the brood (all drone, no larvae) and honey. We found the queen on the brood comb, coated in honey, and placed her at the entrance where she readily walked in. She was very lean and mobile. We pried the queen excluder off the top and cleaned both. Another new beekeeper assisting us brought and donated a 10-frame super to the young man that we placed on top of the hive. We then closed it up with the queen excluder and top.

We have advised the young beekeeper on equipment that he will need (frames for the supers and a couple of replacement frames for the deep). We plan to go back and remove the rest of the comb in the supers and inspect the deep hive body. We are not sure what to do if we find a lot of worker brood in the supers. If there is room, we can cut out, rubber band into empty frames and place in the deep(?).

We would appreciate advice from someone who has had a similar experience with a neglected hive and can provide steps we should take and possible pitfalls we should avoid.

Thank you,
Piedmont NC

[Walliebee]

It sounds like you are on the right track. Based on what you describe it is very likely you will find brood as you go deeper into the unframed super. The best approach is to treat it as you would a standard cutout. Remove comb with the honey, and band the brood onto framed. These will be shallow frames that will go into one of the shallow super. It is being cutout of a shallow, so there is no reason why to put it into anything larger. Use kitchen shears to trim it for the best fit into the frames. You will not have ten frames worth, so have some shallow frames with foundation to fill the box. Once the brood hatches from the banded frames, replace them with frames of foundation.

If the deep does have frames, and a lot of brood, you could just make it easy and trash everything that is not framed from the super. Then you can add the new super on the deep and go from there. It is an excellent time to do this as we are close to our main flow and a strong population of workers will get this hive into shape in a hurry.

Keep in mind that old damaged comb that has honey and or pollen in it is a prime location for SHB larve to hatch. This can happen very fast and hit hard, so try to aviod this and use the brood only if you choose that route.

I hope that queen is ok. I always hate to see one get honey-blobbed!

[cg3]

Off topic but similar. I am planning to cut comb from a TBH and rubber band it into frames to start some nucs. When working with brood comb is there a practical time limit to avoid damage to the brood?

[Scrapfe]

...We removed the mountain of comb off the top, separating the brood (all drone, no larvae) and honey. We found the queen on the brood comb, coated in honey, and placed her at the entrance where she readily walked in. She was very lean and mobile.

You would think that with all those bees present and a slim downed queen that they would have swarming on their mind.

[Piedmont NC]

Thanks for the advice Walliebee. I'm assuming you are referring to the partially damaged old comb we left in the supers that would be susceptible for SHB larvae to hatch. The mountain of comb we removed from the top was taken away and either crushed for the honey or melted for the wax (drone brood comb). I would prefer to band the brood into shallow frames, but since the comb is 2 supers deep, we may find some brood more suited to a deep frame.

As for the queen, she was slim and looked healthy enough to take flight (if she hadn't been coated with honey). Also, there was no larvae in the brood we removed. They could be preparing to swarm or she could be a virgin who superceded the old queen and hasn't mated.

Our other concern is the difficulty of removing frames from the deep to inspect.