I moved up some honey on a couple of my hives. They are in one deep with two mediums on top for brood chambers. I'm having trouble getting them to draw out the plastic foundation in the honey supers so I moved up several frames of honey from the medium brood boxes and either replaced them with foundation or with frames with brood laid in drawn honey super frames. It seemed to rile up one of the hives and I got quite a few stings thru my socks in the ankles. Later I wondered if it(moving honey frames) was worth it. Is this what some of you mean by opening up the brood chamber? Wouldn't the bees have finally drawn and filled up the honey supers themselves by moving uncapped honey up if I had left them alone?
Quote from: twb on July 09, 2008, 11:17:50 PM
I moved up some honey on a couple of my hives. They are in one deep with two mediums on top for brood chambers. I'm having trouble getting them to draw out the plastic foundation in the honey supers so I moved up several frames of honey from the medium brood boxes and either replaced them with foundation or with frames with brood laid in drawn honey super frames. It seemed to rile up one of the hives and I got quite a few stings thru my socks in the ankles. Later I wondered if it(moving honey frames) was worth it. Is this what some of you mean by opening up the brood chamber? Wouldn't the bees have finally drawn and filled up the honey supers themselves by moving uncapped honey up if I had left them alone?
There's several methods of opening up the brood chamber. The 2 I like to use is to either move the 2 storage frames up into the super, moving the next frames in out and putting the new frames next to the brood chamber or just taking the 2nd frame from each side up to the super and replacing them with new frames. Either way puts frames of honey and bees up in the super and makes the bees draw new comb adjacent to the brood frames, these will almost always be brood size comb. Just moving and replacing the outside storage frames often results in odd sized "storage" comb that isn't good for either worker or drone brood.
If you're using plastic frames the bees need a lot of encouragement to work it. If you're using an excluder remove it until the bees have drawn the greater part of 3 frames before using it. The majority of books usually omit the qualifier on using an excluder that the bees hate to go through it and often won't until the honey super has been worked to some extent, then install the excluder.
Hope this helps.