One very simple reason for double brood: I'm only 5'6", and not remotely strong. I can just about manage a single brood box, at some risk of damaging myself.Originally Posted by madasafish
So committing to large, heavy single boxes (which I'm currently doing with the Zest frames) is
...umm...
does anyone know the difference between "brave" and "just plain stupid"??!
Spent this morning looking at a potential out apiary. 3.5 miles away.
Most of those miles are along a narrow, lethal A-road, so it would mean committing to regular diesel-powered bee miles again. Really interesting to hear that the "3 feet or 3 miles" isn't as hard and fast a rule as I always thought it was, thanks.
I'm back on topic at last! The second queen was out of the cage by yesterday morning - took 24 hours or less. Thanks for the tip - that would have been a bad mistake to make, after all this fuss.
I love the fondant that Andrew Abrahams uses. Not too sticky to start off with as the commercial invert stuff I bought (so the queen's less likely to end up stuck on her back drowning in the stuff), and doesn't set rock hard, either.
Now the queens are out, the worry is that they are in tiny, depopulated nucs that can just about keep a single deep frame warm. How long would you wait before checking for eggs, and then before uniting with the stronger host colony?
Can't you guide them to build straight combs, Emma, by using bamboo sticks or wire, for example, or alternating the frames with previously drawn frames?
Kitta
I would wait a couple of weeks before combining so she has time to settle in and establish her own brood nest.
I would not try and combine a very small queenright colony with a very large queenless one. Might work but quite risky if it is a queen you dont want to lose.
It's raining here in the south, so, back off topic.
If, as you suggest, you go over to just using national shallow boxes it would be relatively simple to add two boxes of straight combs above the 'curvy cross comb' early enough in the season. The queen will head to the top box before going down to the floor.
Two would be needed simply because one shallow on it's own doesn't have the depth to get the nest out of the cross comb box. I've used a similar idea with mating nucs, adding an empty box underneath them at the start of September, allowing them to build wild comb for brood rearing from the bottom bars of their frames while filling the mating nuc combs with feed, then in March/early April it's a simple task to go around and scrape all the wild comb off and return them to their correct single box configuration because they've always moved into the top box by that stage. I aquired the idea from an American who claims to use the method on full size langstroth colonies with good success. He suggests that the wild comb built to their own design may actually aid wintering by means of air flow regulation etc .....but we're now getting a little too close to the territory of certain math mad insulation experts for my liking
Nadiring seems to slow bees down no end, I suppose the natural beekeeper's might say that it brings them back to their natural rythm..... personally I think that it's possibly going to be expensive (for the bees) in the kind of marginal locality that you describe, presumably they have a short enough season already. There's a lot that I like about the warre hive but I think that the standard management practices leave plenty to be desired. In your situation I think that I'd be tempted to off-load the masses of national gear (as long as it's not sentiment which is governing your decision) and use the money to buy some tidy warre boxes from icko (or other continental supplier) complete with frames for the brood bodies and topbars for the supers -that's how I'd run them, with an excluder. But remember that you need ladder comb for them to get to the top of their super; presumambly the true reason that Warre adopted the nadiring method. If you have the time to track it down there's some usable nineteenth century literature by British and American writers that deals with keeping bees in boxes of approx same internal footprint as the warre, but without all the faff.
No real need for them to be a fixed mass of comb if you choose not to use the frames. melliferac's suggestions are excellent but if you prefer (and you're using removable topbars) it's usually easy enough to 'correct' comb by gently pushing it over to where you'd like it to be.
A lot of natural beekeepers set themselves up for an unmanageable mess by simply not managing. It's all quite simple really:
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I'd like to try fishing line, that's a very good thought, Kitta. I've been meaning to for ages, but it's never quite got onto the urgent list. Probably not the bamboo sticks, as the curves and waves I get often start at the edge of the comb, so a vertical guide nearer the centre wouldn't help.
If it's a brood comb, the top corners are their main place for storing honey, and they'll bulge those areas wide, which often starts to interfere with the line of the next comb... and the next and the next... A wave starts to form across the box. If it's a stores comb, they'll bulge anywhere and everywhere. That's why alternating the frames doesn't work.
So in the brood nest, alternating full and empty frames can lead to lovely straight comb - but sometimes with a gap in the corners as they've bulged the neighbouring stores faster than they've drawn the new comb. Or with a bulge in the corners, if the neighbouring comb is slower to develop.
In a stores area, if I alternate drawn combs with empty they will happily fill the entire space by widening the existing combs on either side of the gap. Sometimes they'll do it even if those combs had been capped. I have an example in the hut, I'll try to remember to take a photo! I've seen cells 2 inches long, I think - I'll try to remember to measure some of them. They're quite impressive, little long bee tunnels. And the bees will make some wonderful 3-D jigsaw puzzles, if you take just a piece out of a neighbouring comb.
Fascinating, but only as an experiment. It gets a bit wearing for every day.
Last edited by Emma; 20-08-2016 at 12:09 PM.
Thanks. Worry was making me impatient. I'm waiting a little longer. The nests are being well defended, and at least one is warm.
I found your post here helpful, as well: http://www.sbai.org.uk/sbai_forum/sh...67-Re-queening
Great info in there - which would be enhanced if the photo links were to work. I found a stash (a very large one) of images on the server at the last upgrade and hope to devote some time this quiet season to get them visible again. I think it will be only possible one picture at a time so I may be selective.
I love the idea. It's so clever.It's raining here in the south, so, back off topic
If, as you suggest, you go over to just using national shallow boxes it would be relatively simple to add two boxes of straight combs above the 'curvy cross comb' early enough in the season. The queen will head to the top box before going down to the floor.
Two would be needed simply because one shallow on it's own doesn't have the depth to get the nest out of the cross comb box. I've used a similar idea with mating nucs, adding an empty box underneath them at the start of September, allowing them to build wild comb for brood rearing from the bottom bars of their frames while filling the mating nuc combs with feed, then in March/early April it's a simple task to go around and scrape all the wild comb off and return them to their correct single box configuration because they've always moved into the top box by that stage. I aquired the idea from an American who claims to use the method on full size langstroth colonies with good success.
But I do keep coming a cropper with clever ideas, particularly when they rely on exact timing.
This year, the spring was so cold that I couldn't get into the hives. Meanwhile, the bees were busy inside. By the time I could make my first inspection, they were already making swarm preps. Any plan I make has to be robust enough to cope with that kind of spring.
Yes... even Heidi Hermann admitted that the bees are reluctant to move down across the next bar in a Warre.
And I was lying awake the other night imagining what bees might do in a nadir in an OSR flow. I think the word "frantic" probably has to be in there somewhere... (Followed by "swarm"!)
But I love the idea of letting them build continuously into fresh brood comb, and letting them keep all the honey, until I'm sure the brood nest has moved far enough away, with enough honey around it, that I can take what really is a surplus, & take away some of the oldest, mankiest brood comb at the same time. That's the theory. I have no idea what would happen in practice. I might try it with one or two colonies, see what happens.
Ouch! No way! I went with my dad's boxes partly out of sentiment, but also because it makes me compatible with most of the beekeepers in Scotland. And I'm not attracted to Warre boxes, I just hate supering.
That literature sounds interesting, though - do you have any links or references, or names I could track down?
Also... why is Warreing a faff? I haven't read in detail, but thought the idea was to simply add boxes underneath, & eventually take one off the top, catching what swarms you could along the way. Not so much a faff as an enormous lifting challenge - if you obey the instruction never, ever to separate brood boxes.
Those are lovely pics. Of brood combs.
I don't have a problem with wild brood comb. I've run nothing else since 2014. They bulge & wave a bit at the corners, but there's usually time to go in & straighten them before any actual crosscombing happens. I've had wild comb nests up to 22 frames long, and hope to have longer once I've built a longer box. Some of the deep combs are on bottomless shallow frames, because I ran out of deeps last year, & just took the bottom bars off drawn shallow combs. They're fine, too - some of them are just gorgeous, I was admiring them a few days ago.
It's the supers that get me... Bees have no reason at all to produce parallel 35mm combs in a super, so they don't.
Well, mine don't, anyway - what do yours do?
Do you use more widely-spaced bars in supers?
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