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timintexas

Overcrowded?

timintexas
16 years ago

I have this hive and it is going gang-busters. I had a die-out hive last winter and had set this hive off to the side to be cleaned ect. I went to work on it and and a swarm had moved in! Great....

Now- here is the problem. The brood box is one of those ones with all those little frames (I think for Queen breeding? I got this as a part of a total purchase of a guys eqpt.) and I did not want to use it this year but the bees had other plans. When I had set the dead-out hive off to the side, this weird brood box was sitting on top of a shallow super.

Ok, like I said, this hive is amazing...growing by leaps and bounds, better than my other 12 hives. It filled 2 supers in 2 weeks(!). When I first put the supers on, I noticed that this weird brood box was jammed up with honey..I could not even see into the frames nor could I pull them to look for the queen. I assumed the queen was in this box though (remember, there is a med. super below it.) I put an excluder between this box and the two supers when I installed them.

When I went out to check them yesterday, there were tons of bees just hanging around all over the front and back- not doing a whole lot. I got the distinct feeling they were simply out of space. We are in a full flow right now, they should be off doing their thing.

I had one last super left (buying more tomorrow)and what I did was this...maybe stupid..

I broke the hive down and took off the excluder above the weird brood box and put the empty, drawn super there, rather than on top(above the near full supers), figuring the congestion would be in this area. I then put the excluder on top of this new super. I put the near full supers back on top of this and, for the first time ever, I put a shim in between the supers to make for a top entrance.

Was this to much fooling around? I fear that the weird brood box is honey bound and the queen may be below in the bottom super but no way for me to know. There was so much honey in that box that when I pulled off the excluder, it ripped the tops off of honey cells. I took a gamble when I put the empty box on top of this one rather than below it, assuming the queen will move up (if she even can).

What do you think?

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