I spun out a lot of frames from the brood boxes of my dead out hives yesterday. I needed to make room for the new queen to lay. I was planning on feeding it back to them, what is the best way to do it? can I use my hive top feeder for it?
the honey is a lot better than I thought it would be so I may bottle some of it and feed them 1:1 syrup. what do you all think.
Also, in prepping the boxes for the new packages I arranged the frames as follows:
outside frames #1 and #10, I put back the same frames that are partially filled with honey.
frames #2 and #9 put fully capped frames of honey
frames 3 and 8 new unpulled frames
the remaining middle frames are fully pulled comb frames that I spun out.
thanks.
I don't understand your strategy. You wanted to free up comb for the queen to lay in, so you extracted the honey. But if you feed it (or syrup) back to the bees, they will store it in comb, using up the space you liberated. I suppose they might even be putting the same honey back in the same cells you extracted it from.
If you want more free comb, don't feed. If you need to feed, you should leave the honey in it's original comb and just put the frames of honey where they are needed.
Sounds like a good plan to get room for getting brood. Just keep an eye on their stores.
With my bees, feeding honey causes too much robbing. I know some people do it with success though.
Quote from: FRAMEshift on April 30, 2012, 03:19:25 PM
I don't understand your strategy. You wanted to free up comb for the queen to lay in, so you extracted the honey. But if you feed it (or syrup) back to the bees, they will store it in comb, using up the space you liberated. I suppose they might even be putting the same honey back in the same cells you extracted it from.
If you want more free comb, don't feed. If you need to feed, you should leave the honey in it's original comb and just put the frames of honey where they are needed.
:idunno: :idunno:
I don't see a problem with your frame placements rgy. I would probably have put the capped frames in positions 1 and 10 but no big deal; your way should work fine. I'm kind of with frameshift of this one. I don't think I would feed the dead outs (packages?) your honey. You eat that yourself :)
4 frames of honey in your deeps should be way more than enough for a new package plus there is lots of nectar in Michigan right now. I don't think you really need to feed anything beyond what you've done. I just hived a 5 lb swam yesterday and only gave them 1 medium frame of honey. There's lots of nectar in Michigan at this point.
If you do want to feed back some of the honey, I would open feed. I'm currently open feeding some slum gum from my mating frames. Bees are going after it, but not setting off a robbing frenzy at this time of the season up here. Bees go more nuts over 1:1. Bees can easily get stuck in honey though so if you open feed you need to devise a system so they don't get stuck like bugs in amber.
Quote from: BlueBee on April 30, 2012, 05:15:32 PM
I'm kind of with frameshift of this one. I don't think I would feed the dead outs (packages?) your honey. You eat that yourself :)
I'm in favor of feeding honey to bees. There is good research showing bees do better with honey than with sugar syrup. But I don't understand why you would extract honey and then feed it back. The easiest way to feed honey is to leave it in the capped comb. Why go to the effort to extract and then make the bees go to the effort of storing and capping it again?
If the issue is that some hives need honey and others need empty comb, move some frames around between hives.
I would not have extracted. Let the bees do the work. Set the boxes out and in a couple of days, the bees would have cleaned up those frames. Or just put them into the hives.
There should be a flow. No need to feed. Keep it.