I have two colonies that have two deeps plum full of capped brood, pollen and some larva. My bees gathered so much pollen already Im worried they will swarm. I am going to add another deep with brood comb to each but Im wondering what you do or would do when/if you encounter this situation? There is really no where or the queen to lay unless I added honey supers but I dont want them loading these full of pollen and brood too. Is it common to need three deeps during Monster pollen flows? Sorry I dont have any pics. When I was filming my camera told me I ran out of memory and I did not download the stuff on it to my pc yet.
However, what do you make of this?
Failing queen 3/16/2010 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2M718pjOsQ#ws)
Failing queen 4/1/2010 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vszBwPOyxMc#ws)
I was going to watch and see what happened but like a bone head I reversed the supers and the bottom did not seal tight with the top and today I saw it was being robbed to death. Tomorrow Im shaking out whats left and adding these supers to the hives I wrote about above. Oh well.
I use in summer 3 deep brood boxes. Usually the lowest is the pollen store. My bees consume almost all pollen stores in late summer when they rear winter bees. That is a habit of Italian bees.
Pollen is valuable and you may store them when you lift up the frames and bees cap pollen with honey and wax.
You Americans have really black combs in your hives, as I see in pictures.
Finski,
do you leave anything on top of that ?
If splitting is an option for you then i thk you should try that.
Quote from: wd on April 08, 2010, 04:33:39 AM
Finski,
do you leave anything on top of that ?
You mean how many boxes alltogether?
Over those 3 deeps I put 4-5 medium boxes for honey.
When bees cap one box, they need 3 boxes to spread nectar in combs to dry up extra water.
To store nectar they use brood boxes too.
To avoid swarming they need a lot room.
These hives all brought 120 kg honey in 3 weeks. It depends on weather and on pastures what finally happens when it is time.
(http://bee.freesuperhost.com/yabbfiles/Attachments/Kuva_049.jpg)
(http://bee.freesuperhost.com/yabbfiles/Attachments/valmis3.jpg)
Quote from: Jahjude on April 08, 2010, 02:50:31 PM
If splitting is an option for you then i thk you should try that.
That destroyes surely the honey yield.
I would say run three deeps, split when you can,
I'm not 7 ft tall but running three deeps is what I try to obtain with all wood boxes, migratory and telescoping covers. From the bottom up and what I see, the average commercial units in the area are two deeps, one deep one medium, one medium one deep. They tend to grow every year in the amount of units per yard.
Hmm, I could swear I replied to this already. Anywho, I added a box today to each hive I spoke of. To my astonishment when I tiped up the first box on the second hive I added a box to I counted almost thirty queen cups built since the last time I was in it. I found them raising a serious amount of drones, and I also found some queen cups scattered throughout the hive on sides of frames. Well over thirty queen cups. I did not see any eggs or royal jelly in them. At first I was disappointed but since I cant get queens from my local supplier I figure Ill hope I can keep a close enough eye on them, get some good old swarm cell queens, and hopefully some good mating weather. That is of course if they go for it. I added a deep box and put a frame of empty drawn comb in position 3, 5, and 7 in each box. Not sure if this was the right thing to do or not to open up the brood nest to prevent swarming. Either way Ill deal with what I get.
So, from your experience does queen cup building like this mean swarming is in inevitable?