Sucking down the sugar water still

Gconran,

I noticed the same thing with my hives. If they are sucking down the sugar syrup, keep feeding them. They will use the 1:1 to generate wax and build comb faster.

I stopped feeding my hives and the comb production just came to a halt. Put the syrup back on and they went back to drawing out the comb.

You mentioned that your bees still haven't drawn out a few frames of comb. I'm presumming that it is probably your outside frames right? I found it helps to move those frames closer towards the middle but not IN the middle. Those are your brood frames. Move the outer frames in towards the middle by one or two frames. That should help, I know it did for me.

Good luck.

Here in S. W. Mo. there isn't much coming in mid July (nectar) and the girls need the feed to draw out the foundation and build stores for winter. They will usually quit taking syrup if we get a fall flow. Jack

Thanks. I did move a few frames around like you said, and I hope this solves the issue. Being my first year, I'm not expecting to get to the supering point, but having a healthy and full hive would be nice. Seeing that I'm only using 8 frame hives, it's even more important, I believe, to have a full stock heading into winter (still some ways off, of course).

If I still have hives that are not built out come autumn, I suppose the best recourse is to collapse the weak hives into strong ones?

As far as hives not ready for winter goes, you can make that call come autumn. You may be surprised how much the bees can build if you keep 1:1 on them till the fall flow.

Recently a few of my hives surprised me. They suddenly began building like made and over the course of 3-4 weeks, the hive exploded in population. I still see capped brood in the hives and that means more bees hatching off.

Keep it going and let us know what happens.

All the best.