Joined
·
523 Posts
Hoping Matt and others with OSBN experience will weigh in on this.
I'm in SW Ohio and my seven hives are all bringing in nectar like mad right now, though there have been and are forecast to be a lot of days with rain and we had a lot of late cool weather recently. Been trying the OSBN method this year for the first time. Inspecting my hives on a five day frequency to keep up with their spring buildup. Yesterday I found that all my hives were in the pre-swarm stage: mostly capped brood (and lots of it), very little open brood or eggs. Lots of backfilling with nectar. I think maybe the bloom of things like black locust has hit bigtime all of a sudden. Some trees were zapped by the late freeze and others , by the highway and in warmer spots, are blooming away. The wax drawing impulse has not been strong in my colonies and they haven't up til recently had a lot of nectar to work with to draw on a large scale.
So, I only saw a handful of scattered queen cups with no development in each of the hives. Swarming not imminent but they're almost there. So I found myself with a brood management dilemma: needing to give plenty of space to cut off the swarming impulse, I moved a bunch of capped brood only frames above the QE, and had to put something in its place: foundation and drawn comb. But Matt (I hope you're reading this, Matt) suggests that giving too much comb will lead to too big a summer population, after the main flow. I see the logic of this, but what alternatives do I have? I experimented on one very strong colony with reducing it to two medium brood boxes from three, and moving one of the brood boxes with all capped brood and backfiling above the QE. I gave that colony about 8 frames of foundation. But it's a dilemma: what to do to give the bees room and something to work on, without encouraging a bigger colony? I couldn't leave only full frames of capped brood below the QE - that would give no space at all.
Suggestions? Criticisms? This is a big learning process for me. I'm finding that those who say you can do the math and see that one deep (or two mediums) is plenty of space for the queen to keep laying and not run out of space. I find that not to be the case - all of this capped brood seems to contradict that arithmetic.
Thanks!
I'm in SW Ohio and my seven hives are all bringing in nectar like mad right now, though there have been and are forecast to be a lot of days with rain and we had a lot of late cool weather recently. Been trying the OSBN method this year for the first time. Inspecting my hives on a five day frequency to keep up with their spring buildup. Yesterday I found that all my hives were in the pre-swarm stage: mostly capped brood (and lots of it), very little open brood or eggs. Lots of backfilling with nectar. I think maybe the bloom of things like black locust has hit bigtime all of a sudden. Some trees were zapped by the late freeze and others , by the highway and in warmer spots, are blooming away. The wax drawing impulse has not been strong in my colonies and they haven't up til recently had a lot of nectar to work with to draw on a large scale.
So, I only saw a handful of scattered queen cups with no development in each of the hives. Swarming not imminent but they're almost there. So I found myself with a brood management dilemma: needing to give plenty of space to cut off the swarming impulse, I moved a bunch of capped brood only frames above the QE, and had to put something in its place: foundation and drawn comb. But Matt (I hope you're reading this, Matt) suggests that giving too much comb will lead to too big a summer population, after the main flow. I see the logic of this, but what alternatives do I have? I experimented on one very strong colony with reducing it to two medium brood boxes from three, and moving one of the brood boxes with all capped brood and backfiling above the QE. I gave that colony about 8 frames of foundation. But it's a dilemma: what to do to give the bees room and something to work on, without encouraging a bigger colony? I couldn't leave only full frames of capped brood below the QE - that would give no space at all.
Suggestions? Criticisms? This is a big learning process for me. I'm finding that those who say you can do the math and see that one deep (or two mediums) is plenty of space for the queen to keep laying and not run out of space. I find that not to be the case - all of this capped brood seems to contradict that arithmetic.
Thanks!