[Pete O]

Just the middle frame in a medium super. Maybe a quarter of one side of the foundation is brood. It's a two-deep hive with this medium honey super. The other frames are being filled with honey/nectar.

What to do about the brood frame other than obviously remove it. Cut out the brood? Insert an empty frame/foundation?

 

[psfred]

I would just leave it there. Typically the bees will move the brood nest down and backfill that frame with honey and cap it in a few weeks. Check the box beneath -- if there is a solid band of capped honey below the super with brood, they won't be re-using it for brood and will fill it with honey when the brood emerges.

If you are worried that the bees will have the queen lay in it again, you can put a queen excluder under that box and keep her in the bottom (make sure she is there first, of course!).

I had brood in six boxes this year, three or four frames top to bottom when they started building up. Not my choice, perhaps, but I got a boomer of a hive and the presence of brood in the honey supers doesn't bother me since I extract everything. Cut comb, yeah, brood in the supers would be bad, but for extracting it makes no difference. Have to protect it from wax moths, but that's another issue.

Peter

 

[JWChesnut]

Peak hive population occurs around the Solstice. There is less brood after that, and the brood nest will shrink out of the top super. The bees will backfill the empty cells with summer nectar. Problem solved.

Many newbee's do not realize that the "May" population is not going to last all summer. The bee population follows the sun.
http://www.scientificbeekeeping.com/images/stories/varroa/ipm3_fig1-bee-mite-pop-growth.jpg

 

[psfred]

Very true. My bees are backfilling the drone frames I let them make with honey, and the brood nest is shrinking down to "only" two mediums and a deep packed solid.

They are not bringing in much pollen at the moment, I assume because the brood nest is nearly all older larvae and capped. I anticipate that they will be out of the medium just below the three shallows in a couple weeks, and filling it with nectar and honey, and probably the medium below that, with brood only in the deep for the rest of the summer.

My feral local queen will slow way down on brood in July as the forage drops off dramatically then.

Currently, I have catalpa and persimmons in bloom, and they are going nuts over them. I'm thinking of putting yet another box of foundation on that hive, can't hurt to let them at least start drawing it out. I'll have to use a ladder to get to the top of the hive though.

Peter