Airy Ripe Rakes: The Queens Need Some Room

Sunday, July 21, 2013

The Queens Need Some Room

This weekend any time I spent working on bees was spent making room in the brood chamber for the queen to expand her nest. I decided it was time to reevaluate my decision making paradigm and listen to the voices of experience. Last winter two of the three colonies I had only had a single deep brood chamber and nothing else. They both perished over winter in spite of my feeding efforts. Vinduska, a local honey producer, recently stated to our yahoo group that single brood box colonies don't do very well during Kansas winters. I believe that what he is saying is that the colony is not big enough at the start of winter and it doesn't have enough stores put away to last the winter.

Therefore, I decided that the two small colonies that I have, one of which was from a split and the other had a failing queen, really needed an extra brood box to give the queen room and allow the workers to put more stores away. This means that I won't get any honey from them this year. My attitude has to be that they are an investment and I should get a return next year if I take good care of them. I will probably make this a part of my method of procedure for the smaller half of splits and nucleus colonies.

Also, I purchased a colony from a friend just recently. He had become discouraged and wanted out. The colony I purchased also had no room in the brood chamber for the queen. This colony was housed in two medium depth boxes, and what space was not full of larvae or capped brood was full of honey (and I mean a lot of honey). To give the queen room to expand the colony I added a full depth brood box on top of the small boxes. I also removed any queen cells just in case. They weren't in use but I don't want to take any chances. To this colony I also added a queen excluder and a honey super. They are very numerous and I just might get some surplus. We'll see.

Below are before and after pictures of the colony I purchased. I had already installed the super and as an after thought decided they really need room in the brood chamber.