Progress in Hive1

Hive1 is now full of bees. I've still not seen that queen at all but eggs are being laid and new workers are hatching, I'm also not seeing any swarm cells or supercedure cells so I guess the bees must like her. Something I have noticed is that the bees in Hive1 are a bit slow to draw comb at the front of the hive, the shallow frame I put in nearest the entrance for sacrificial drone brood is untouched so far, although they have torn down a load of comb on one of the national frames and replaced that with drone comb. The bees are so populous in hive1 I decided to super it and take the chance of swapping out some of the original national framed and their adapters for commercial ones.

I ordered a National shallow to use as an eke for the feeder and built up some national deep frames to place in the national deep box along with the removed national deep frames. It all went fine, I pulled out two national frames removed the adapters and popped them in the middle of the deep box, put a queen excluder over the commercial brood box and the national deep over that. I figured the existing eggs and brood in the removed national frames would hatch and leave those frames whilst the bees below drew out the commercial frames below. It worked perfectly, not one swarm cell was made.

What I did find though was the plastic queen excluder was a total pain to use. The bees covered it in bright orange propolis, some bees got caught in the holes, others got caught in the propolis. Removing it took an age as I had to free it from the box and the frame tops it was also stuck to. I wound up ordering some framed wire excluders and shelving the plastic ones -maybe I'll lose them next auction I attend.

Some bees. Of course.