Expanding while mixing foundation and foundation-less

Beeonefarms said:

The Good news is with all the hard work the bees are doing next year will be even easier.

Click to expand...

I agree, based on my own limited experience. This year I am better able to pay attention to what is going on and plan accordingly, rather than be in a semi-constant troubleshooting and head-scratching mode. Input I've received from this site has been extremely valuable and so, too, have attending club meetings and working with more experienced beeks.

Yeah, I know that my bees seem to be oddballs. This year I thought that I'd get them during a good flow, and at a time when the hive was crammed full of bees following a split. I've tried supers of foundationless, sticking a frame in-between drawn comb or on the outside. No luck. I'm not trying to move over to foundationless, but would like to take a shot at having some cut comb honey. I am sure that it is something simple being done/not being done on my part.

Arpolis, if you haven't heard it yet, if you ask 3 beekeepers one question you will get more than three different answers. Beekeeping is local, and success depends on a number of factors. What is true for my bees in my yard in my area likely will not translate perfectly to your situation. On the bright side, no matter what I've done the bees have made it through despite me. I think that will also be true for you.

Thanks again. Here are some pics of the new brood box:

You can see it in the pic that I mis measured something. Probably the depth of my cut with the Dado blade to join the box corners. So because of that my frames are about an 1/8 - 3/16 too long and are hard to fit in the lower box. I did not realize this till I had two frames from the bottom in the middle of the top one. So I quickly looked at all the empty frames and two were slightly smaller so I squeezed them in the bottom box and opted to only put in two frames in the new box. Let's cross out fingers and hope for the best.

I wanted to give a little update to document how mixing the frames has gone. On the 16th which was 7 days after adding the second deep hive box there was no comb built on the foundation-less frames. About 4 - 5 days later I noticed about double the bees hanging out at the hive entrance and near twice the bee traffic in the air. Today the 24th just 15 days after adding the box and frames I noticed 5 separate frames (the two placed in box one and 3 around the two already full frames in the top box) all had strait pretty looking comb. Some was attached to the side bars but none all the way to the bottom bar yet and only about 1/3 of the total space filled between the 5 frames.

I had to make zero corrections for crooked comb. Now I did notice that the two frames around the foundation-less frames in the bottom and the two normal frames in the top had much fatter comb than before. So I moved one of the frames from the top to the bottom and one foundation-less from the bottom back to the top and squeezed the full frames as close as I dared together so there is little to no walking room in between the comb. I did not think I could fit the other full frame from the top back into the bottom without scraping comb bad and possibly hurting bees. The foundation comb that I moved was all honey with about the top 1/3 all capped off. It was beautiful! Do you all think the bees will correct the fat comb themselves so they can move in between those frames and get to the cells?

With the fat comb issue I think next time I will not move full frames in between the foundationless and just pay attention and make corrections to the comb as necessary.

Ok another update today!

It has been 24 days since adding the 10 new foundationless frames. I opened her up and took a good look at the new box on top. I was a little over confident and built another deep hive body and frames to add on if needed.

All but 3 of my foundationless frames have some Comb drawn on them. But a good estimate may be there is only 4 1/2 frames worth of fully drawn comb. So just under half way done. I would like to add one more deep body this year in hopes of having 30 frames of drawn comb to work with for possible splits next year. I would like to have 3 hives all together. But that is all up in the air with how well this hive does and if I feel confident that a 3 way split will not hurt things.

The one frame I still had moved from the bottom to the top had capped and uncapped brood in it still with a little nectar and polen. All the newly drawn comb in the top box had nothing but nectar and capped honey. The one foundationless in the bottom box was filled with uncapped brood all in there and the comb fully drawn out. All my comb looks good with nothing crooked or bad looking.

One good thing to note was that before the colony population really started to boom and the foundationless really being drawn I was noticing an increased number of SHB! I purchased a batch of beneficial Nematodes and treated the area around the hive and in this inspection I did not notice a single beetle at all! So happy times there! Think I should wait a couple weeks before checking again or check again next Thursday?

Ok a good bit of time has passed. I did get around to adding the 3rd hive body after the second was full. The second box looked awesome with all strait comb. I added a few frames to the 3rd box and let her go. The second box went so well I paid little attention to it and let the bees do their thing. I found some comb running fat and others running skinny making it a mess pulling a couple frames out. I tried to re-position the frames to fix this. I checked again a couple days ago and all the frames where filled out with the exception of two. One frame had nothing on it at all but the bees built out the frame to the left of this one out so far that it was taking up half the empty space and then 2 large bridge combs to the frame to the right of the empty one.

There is still time this year and it looks like the bees have plenty honey for the winter. So to correct this large comb I just harvested the whole frame. I built a crush and strainer out of some food grade buckets and plumbing to make a honey gate with a ball valve. The whole crushing process went really well and now I have 6.5lb of my very first harvested honey!

I shared a bunch with friends at work and the resounding response was "WOW! That is what real honey tastes like? Amazing!". Very dark and thick honey with a lot of floral notes.