I decided that it was time to REALLY check out my bees for the spring… I’ve only got the one hive, so I’ve been wanting to add a box or two – to allow them to increase their numbers so that I can make a split or two off of it.<\/p>\n
I decided to checkerboard my frames as such: I currently had (1) 10-frame deep and (1) Shallow super. I suited up, grabbed my hive tool and fired up the smoker.<\/p>\n
I pulled the shallow super off of the deep box, then pulled a deep frame, and placed it into another deep box. This allowed me to move the other frames without worrying about rolling any of the bees (especially the queen!) between frames. I wound up, with the following layout:<\/p>\n
Med Super: 0000000000
\nShallow SUPER: XXXXXXXXXX
\nAdded Deep: X0X0X00X0X
\nOriginal Deep: X0X0X00X0X (X = existing frame with drawn comb on foundation; 0= empty frame with wooden starter strip)<\/p>\n
The shallow super had capped brood, developing larvae, and freshly laid eggs in it. There was still 2-3 frames of honey in the shallow super. There was also what appeared to be a swarm queen cell – placed between the original shallow super and the deep hive box. Unfortunately, the swarm queen cell was destroyed when I removed the shallow super. I was curious as to the taste, etc of the bee larvae, so I ate one of the larvae that had been in the destroyed cells from my removing the super. Kind of sweet!<\/p>\n
I really hope that I have not created TOO MUCH space in the hive. I don’t want them to abscond from my giving them too much area in which to live. I’ll wait a week or two, and let them repair their propolis and hopefully draw some new comb on the empty frames.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I decided that it was time to REALLY check out my bees for the spring… I’ve only got the one hive, so I’ve been wanting to add a box or two – to allow them to increase their numbers so that I can make a split or two off of it.<\/p>\n
I decided to checkerboard […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[96,98],"tags":[143,152,172,251,257,342,352,390,409],"class_list":["post-1032","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bee-yard","category-beekeeping","tag-bees","tag-boxes","tag-checkerboard","tag-hive","tag-honey","tag-pollen","tag-queen-cell","tag-split","tag-swarm-cell","odd"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2ze45-gE","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bohemianutopia.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1032","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bohemianutopia.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bohemianutopia.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bohemianutopia.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bohemianutopia.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1032"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.bohemianutopia.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1032\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bohemianutopia.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1032"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bohemianutopia.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1032"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bohemianutopia.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1032"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}