Checked the 4 hives last week. Each hive, which were started from new packages, has 2 deep brood boxes topped with a medium super. In the medium supers I have alternating frames of 1 plastic foundation frame then one foundationless frame filling out the 10 frame supers. The bees are drawing out the plastic and filling them with 100% nectar. The foundationless frames are all being drawn out to drone size comb. Most of the drone size comb is either empty or in various stages of producing drones including capped drone cells. I am planning on checking the hives tomorrow. I am trying to produce comb honey. Any advice? I removed the queen excluders a few days after I put the supers on because the bees seemed reluctant to pass through it.
Thanks
It's what bees do. I'm sorry but I don't understand what your ultimate goal is. If they are drawing out drone size cells then they'll use them for nectar and/or drone brood. My thinking is drone brood equals possible future swarms. After a period most hives will kick out the drones.
Bees often make large sized cells for honey storage anyway, but yes, they will also use it for drones! The only problem if you want comb honey is that you don't want dark comb/cocoons. I don't think that you'll find that they will put drone brood in all the super combs though, and you can just extract those combs that have also had brood in them - it won't affect the color or flavor of the honey.
Thanks. I am trying to produce comb honey. I just finished checking the hives. One hive is behind the others so I left it as is, 2 deep brood boxes full and a medium super with 25% drawn comb.
The medium supers in the other 3 hives were identical; they had honey in all 5 of the plastic foundations (each 25% capped). Of the 5 frames in the supers with no foundation in each hive, the 2 toward the center were drawn out 90% and filled with brood. Half of the brood was capped drones. I removed the 2 frames from each super that had capped drones and placed them in the freezer (wrapped in plastic).
I was surprised that there was so much drone brood in the supers because when I checked last week there was drone brood at the bottom of the brood box frames and the bees were chewing them all apart before the drones developed.
Thanks again.
Sometimes our intentions don't seem to matter to the bees themselves...they do whatever they want regardless of our plans :-)
I have notice if you put damaged foundation frames in a honey super they will repair it with drone comb - but then not fill it until desperate for storage space - many a time I have taken out a fully capped frame with a patch of empty drone comb in it. On the other hand in the last 9 months I have started using foundationless frames and I have noticed the comb is bigger than brood comb (on foundation) but not as big as drone comb and they filled and capped the lot.
If they intend to put honey in cells and they are drawing them from scratch the cells will be bigger because it uses less wax. If you give them worker foundation they grin and bear it and build worker cells. If they are building from scratch though it will not be worker size cells. You will see this if you use the "Lauri" partial foundation method. The foundation will be worker cell and the open spot will be larger.