I have a very strong hive in a double deep with a fresh Queen from this Spring that I had been planning on reducing to a single deep to try and make some comb honey.
The flow is starting to kick in so yesterday I set out to ready the hive.
What I found was the bottom deep plugged with honey and no brood. Top deep had 6-7 frames of capped brood and very little open brood. The rest was also plugged out with honey and any available cells in brood nest were backfilled. At least a dozen swarm cells were on the brood frames ranging in stages of 2 that were capped, to cups with eggs in them.
Above the excluder is a honey super filled with honey and another super that has 1 frame of drawn comb (filled with honey) and 9 frames of foundation hat they have not touched.
I found the Queen and put her in a nuc with a frame of emerging brood and scraped all the Swarm cells except for the 2 capped ones. I also removed he excluder.
Not knowing what to do next, I closed the hive up to ponder my next move.
It left me wondering if this is a good comb honey candidate considering their lack of comb drawing initiative?
My first thought was to use the swarm cells and brood to start some nucs, but do I want to propagate those characteristics? So, away went the cells.
What next?
The flow is starting to kick in so yesterday I set out to ready the hive.
What I found was the bottom deep plugged with honey and no brood. Top deep had 6-7 frames of capped brood and very little open brood. The rest was also plugged out with honey and any available cells in brood nest were backfilled. At least a dozen swarm cells were on the brood frames ranging in stages of 2 that were capped, to cups with eggs in them.
Above the excluder is a honey super filled with honey and another super that has 1 frame of drawn comb (filled with honey) and 9 frames of foundation hat they have not touched.
I found the Queen and put her in a nuc with a frame of emerging brood and scraped all the Swarm cells except for the 2 capped ones. I also removed he excluder.
Not knowing what to do next, I closed the hive up to ponder my next move.
It left me wondering if this is a good comb honey candidate considering their lack of comb drawing initiative?
My first thought was to use the swarm cells and brood to start some nucs, but do I want to propagate those characteristics? So, away went the cells.
What next?