pulling up the super
With spring coming early, we got to do our first inspection of the beehives last weekend. All our hives made it through the winter, which, despite the warm weather, is still a roll of the dice each year.
Hive #1 was re-queened twice last year; the hive never thrived, and I wondered whether it would make it through the winter. It did, thankfully. We opened this beehive up and found the bees to be good, crawling all over the sugar cakes we fed them through the winter – see our winter bee feeding video here.
After removing the sugarcakes, I started to take off the supers, and when pulling the second super, I felt the telltale rubber band pull of burr comb.
Burr comb is honeycomb where you don’t want honeycomb to be. Honeybees don’t like open space, they will fill any void with honeycomb.
What I had forgotten last summer when we re-queened was I neglected to remove the queen cage when we put the 2nd new queen in the hive. The queen is in a small cage to introduce her slowly to the hive, and you have to remove one of the frames of the hive to fit the cage in temporarily.
comb full of honey
So I forgot to remove the queen cage after the queen was released by the workers, and the honeybees filled up that open space with a huge piece of honeycomb. Which just happen to be full of honey from last fall when we found it. We removed the honeycomb, put in a frame, and put the hive back together with a sugar feeder on top for the early spring.
The honeycomb tasted great, we brought it to our friends house for dinner.
you can see the space the comb filled in the lower super
Tonia Moxley
Another option would have been to tie it into a new frame and let the bees attach and reuse it.
scott
Hey Eric, why not put a frame of eggs in the hive next time and let them build their own queen from one of your good hives? Cheers scott
eric : GardenFork.TV
@scott, i don’t have enough hives to raise queens, you need a lot of drone diversity to do that
eric : GardenFork.TV
@tonia the hive has plenty of sugar stores, and 3 supers of drawn comb, so we took the burr comb and had it for dessert.
Scott
Hey Eric,
I thought that was only an issue if you had colony with undesirable traits?
Drone congregation areas draw thousands of drones from hundreds of different colonies. This let the queen collect genes from kilometers around.
I reckon, you should do a shake split with a few frames of eggs from your best hive and see what happens, you might be very pleasantly surprised.
The best queens are the ones you help your bees make.omo.
Plus it would make a great series of new videos for your beekeeping section.
Keep up the great work on GF!
cheers
Scott