Hello all.
I have a couple of questions, hence the 'dual' title and hope there's some good advice
out there...
My hives are doing well now in SC and I've already pulled my honey. Not as much as I'd hoped, but left some for them also. In most of my hives, which consist of 2 deep brood boxes now, I've noticed that the queen is laying up in the top box and not moving down very much - if any, to lay. Is this normal? This is only my 2nd year and I've heard (and did on a couple of boxes) reverse the brood boxes in the spring but don't know if this should be done now or not.
The second thing is that I don't have any more drawn comb to add to my nuc boxes, which I plan to double-stack and over winter this way. I'm using 5-frame Nucs with 1 frame of un-drawn foundation and all other frames have been drawn and have nectar/pollen/honey/etc in them. I don't anticipate them pulling very much the rest of the season - as they didn't do too much last fall at this time of the year. I just added 3 new queens into these splits so I hope/anticipate that she'll start laying pretty strong over the next couple of weeks and they will need the room to move up/store for the winter. So, my question is this ... If I have drawn comb in the bottom brood boxes of my double-brood hives and I take some 'outside' drawn frames and use re-purpose them for my nucs? This sounds plausible and think it would work, but wanted to others to share their experiences.
thanks in advance ...
I have a couple of questions, hence the 'dual' title and hope there's some good advice
My hives are doing well now in SC and I've already pulled my honey. Not as much as I'd hoped, but left some for them also. In most of my hives, which consist of 2 deep brood boxes now, I've noticed that the queen is laying up in the top box and not moving down very much - if any, to lay. Is this normal? This is only my 2nd year and I've heard (and did on a couple of boxes) reverse the brood boxes in the spring but don't know if this should be done now or not.
The second thing is that I don't have any more drawn comb to add to my nuc boxes, which I plan to double-stack and over winter this way. I'm using 5-frame Nucs with 1 frame of un-drawn foundation and all other frames have been drawn and have nectar/pollen/honey/etc in them. I don't anticipate them pulling very much the rest of the season - as they didn't do too much last fall at this time of the year. I just added 3 new queens into these splits so I hope/anticipate that she'll start laying pretty strong over the next couple of weeks and they will need the room to move up/store for the winter. So, my question is this ... If I have drawn comb in the bottom brood boxes of my double-brood hives and I take some 'outside' drawn frames and use re-purpose them for my nucs? This sounds plausible and think it would work, but wanted to others to share their experiences.
thanks in advance ...