observation hive question

[stinger27]

    I was thinking about starting an observation hive.  How should I go about this??  I have 2 hives due to a swarm from my initial hive.  Will it hurt to take a frame of brood and bees from one of them?  Also which of the hives should I take from??  Then do I order a queen and have her ready or leave them queenless a couple of days before installing her??  Any advice will be appreciated.

[Kathyp]

i plan to take a frame of brood and let them raise their own.  i think that would be half the fun for me.  i'll let you know how that goes.  i plan to get mine up in the next couple of weeks.  i identified my spot in the house, but when  my husband checked the stud to make sure it was sound (very old house), he discovered that the stud was good but there was no insulation in that spot.  long story short....can't put my hive up until my wall is back up and projects go slowly around here :-)

[stinger27]

    Thanks kathyp,
    I hope it works out great for you.  I am starting to build mine today.  Hopefully I will have it ready in a couple days if nothing else come up.

[Michael Bush]

http://www.bushfarms.com/beesobservationhives.htm

A frame of brood and a frame a bees and shake in the bees from two more frames of brood.

[Scadsobees]

Yeah, I did just a frame of bees and some extra, then let them raise their own.  If they get a runty queen...who cares?  She can only lay max maybe 5 frames, three for me, currently they only have one medium frame.  It is interesting to watch the whole process of queen raising.  Some of the queen cells looked like drone cells they were so runty.

One thing to watch out for is to make sure that
1. they have enough room in the observation hive on both sides of the frame for the brood to hatch out
2. that the frame of brood is well centered so that point 1) doesn't occur on one of the sides.

I ended up shaving the top bars down quite a lot so they have more manuverability room between the top and the glass.

Rick