When to reduce the hive box.

[Bob Wilson]

When do people begin reducing their hives? I opened the broodnest this spring, but now the hot summer and small hive beetles are about to get bad. Not to mention the usual drought and summer dearth when everything slowed down last year. Do I need to think about taking out some of the unused empty frames and reducing the size of the box for SHB reasons?

[iddee]

If you can remove a box of empty frames, do so. If you mean remove empty frames and leave open space in a box, NEVER,NEVER, NEVER.
The first thing they do is hang wild comb from the lid to fill that space.

[Bob Wilson]

I mean in my horizontal hives, to remove most of the empties and tighten up the broodnest and honey area with the follow board. That means less area and frames for the bees to police for hive beetles. On the other hand, I kept them too tight this spring and suffered a lot of swarming behavior. But learning from last year, June-September is dry and hot, and almost no comb is built from here on.

[Hops Brewster]

My neighbor runs a few horizontal hives, and he continually adjusts the number of frames available to them by keeping 2 empty frames at each end when the hive is growing, and 1 empty frame at each end when the colony is shrinking.    The empties act as overflow room so the bees "don't feel crowded and have room to breathe", he says.

[JojoBeeBoy]

Two while expanding and one while reducing. Your neighbor sounds like he knows what's up.

I have installed a package on 8-10 frames of drawn comb only to find hive beetles had run amok in a month or so. Bees finally dwindled and queen didn't have a clean place to lay despite having both pollen and nectar/honey.

If you are not feeding, then the neighbor's plan sounds good. Bee coverage, good......