Please help inexperienced beginner. A week ago i had a full 10 deep-frame brood chamber, so i decided to add another one. It has been a week and i still haven't seen any activity in the new chamber. No bees and the frames are untouched. Because of bad weather, i do feed them. Is this normal? Could this be because of the rainy weather? How do i fix this?
Thank you
Quote from: melnik on July 08, 2009, 01:24:10 PM
Please help inexperienced beginner. a week ago i had a full 10 deep-frame brood chamber, so i decided to add another one. It has been a week and i still haven't seen any activity in the new chamber. No bees and the frames are untouched. Because of bad weather, i do feed them. Is this normal? Could this be because of the rainy weather? How do i fix this?
Assuming your bees are fine and the hive is queen-right, I'd pull out the frames and spray them with sugar-water on both sides and place them back in the box. Give that a few days and see if more activity.
Melnik -- also, please add your location to your profile which will help us with a general understanding of your location/climate.
-John
Bring up a frame of brood or two into the top deep, that will entice the bees to come up and start working the new frames. Also remember taht if there is no flow going that they simply do not draw out frames as well. Paitence is the forte to beekeeping.
Quote from: melnik on July 08, 2009, 01:24:10 PM
Please help inexperienced beginner. a week ago i had a full 10 deep-frame brood chamber, so i decided to add another one. It has been a week and i still haven't seen any activity in the new chamber. No bees and the frames are untouched. Because of bad weather, i do feed them. Is this normal? Could this be because of the rainy weather? How do i fix this?
Thank you
The method related below is called baiting the super.
Quote from: beee farmer on July 08, 2009, 01:37:04 PM
Bring up a frame of brood or two into the top deep, that will entice the bees to come up and start working the new frames. Also remember taht if there is no flow going that they simply do not draw out frames as well. Paitence is the forte to beekeeping.
An important thing to remember is that bees will only draw comb "under their feet" so drawing comb is population driven. The more bees hatching from the brood area means more bees to occupy the hive and with more bees there needs to be more combs for them to occupy. They will usually draw comb during a honey flow as that is when the population is increasing also.
On the other hand, come fall, the population is decreasing so the bees stop drawing comb and begin backfilling brood areas with honey. Capped honey does not need bees to attend to it so it is left for later consumption as the hive size grows smaller as winter nears. The brood area, however, always requires bee attendence so the cluster size of bees is determined by the size of the brood chamber.