okay added second brood deep today.

[Polarbee]

I have been trying to get back to my girls all week. Work and holidays messed me all up. I knew one of my hives would be pushing out to the final frames. I decided to get into the hives at nine this morning no matter what.

I popped the top and found that they were 7 and 1/2 frames drawn out. I have read that it can be difficult to draw the bees into the second box sometimes. I took frame 2 and 8 out and placed it into the middle of the second box. I then squeezed frames 1 and 10 together with the remaining frames and placed two new frames on the outside of the bottom box. Does that make sense?

Did I do okay here or should I have left well enough alone?

[psfred]

You should be OK. Was this a package or a nuc?

Peter

[Polarbee]

They were started from packages.

[mike haney]

there's no wrong way to do it, but next time consider putting your foundation/frames in #2 and#9 spots with drawn comb on the outside. you'll find a lot of bees need encouragement to draw the outside frame.

[TheBuzz]

Not to hijack but I'm gonna go check mine shortly and I had given them 2 new frames in addition to the 5 they had in their nuc. Should they be on the new ones today do I add 2 more and an additional deep?

[geebob]

Not to hijack but I'm gonna go check mine shortly and I had given them 2 new frames in addition to the 5 they had in their nuc.

Are you using 10 frame boxes? If so, you need to fill it with 10 frames and let them draw that out. You want them to fill 8 frames before adding an additional box. (or am I misreading your question?)

[TheBuzz]

yeah 10 frames. Bee breeder said to keep adding a new one til I got to 8 then add 2 and put on a new level.

[geebob]

Huh... never seen that done before. If I omit a frame, I usually find the bees enthusiastically build new comb attached to the cover.

When was your install? It isn't a good idea to add a second brood box before the population can support it. Depending on the strength of your nuc, that might be around week three. For now, I'd just add the missing frames.

[psfred]

Not a good idea, add all the frames at once and wait until they have drawn most of them before adding more boxes.

If you add them a few at a time and can't get into the hive on schedule for for some reason, you are likely to end up with comb on the top cover instead of in a frame, especially if you have a late nectar flow and a large crop of bees emerge.

Bees really prefer to build comb at the top of the hive, and will do so any time you leave them a space for it. Never leave empty "slots" without a frame, keep them pushed solidly together all the time, and only add space as they need it. A package will have a three week or more lag before the number of bees starts to increase, so will a caught swarm. A nuc should build up in a more linear fashion, but it will still take three weeks from when they draw comb until bees emerge from that comb in the best conditions, usually a bit more.

Peter

[mike haney]

one way to use less than 10 frames (if you have a small divide/swarm/nuc) is to make a "follower board" to put beside the last frame and fill the empty space on the outside with crumpled newspaper. a temp board is easy whacked out of cardboard. i've done this with success when holding a nuc to start a new keeper off-every trick helps around my theiving italians

[Polarbee]

Hmmm, some how I feel Hyjacked.

[toms1arrow]

Polarbee, what you did seems ok if frames 2 & 8 were starting to be drawn. Then like Mike Haney said then put your foundation frames in slots 2 & 9 with drawn comb on the outside. Don't take brood to the outside. Now your not so Hyjacked. Good info in thread no matter.

[Polarbee]

Ha ha ha. Thanks toms1arrow. It has been interesting reading just had to sort what was mine and what was for him.

[TheBuzz]

We both bee learning I put my frames on one side in the order they came.

[geebob]

one way to use less than 10 frames (if you have a small divide/swarm/nuc) is to make a "follower board" to put beside the last frame and fill the empty space on the outside with crumpled newspaper. a temp board is easy whacked out of cardboard.

That is probably the best idea I've seen on the forums this year. I probably run into that situation at least a few times every year and never had a good solution... until now.