Oh, you've had that experience too? I thought it was just me. The TBH I bought
came with bars which had a comb guide on the underside held by 3 small nails.
This just isn't strong enough when you try to pull a 3kg comb up, which has
been furthermore welded to the sides of the hive by enterprising bees. I
managed to finally get the first comb up (the hive was only 80% full of honey)
and then managed to get another couple detached. At this point I found half the
"honey" was uncapped: the bees were obviously still ripening (evaporating)
nectar. Which partly answers you question.
Recent research by Torben Schiffer found that once ees have stashed away enough
honey for the winter, they switch to other behaviours like hygiene (cleaning
the hive, and ejecting suspicious larvae); grooming parasitic mites off each
other; propolising. Probably other stuff. So actually they get LESS stressed
when their larder is full, they seem to really chill out!
This means that although beekeepers traditionally get worried if a hive is not
flying, thinking "there must be something wrong with it", in many cases this is
actually the opposite of the real situation. The bees simply have something
more important (t them) to do than gather nectar so the beek can have more
honey.
A related issue is called "honey binding", which refers to when a colony
collects more nectar than it has room to store. They begin using brood comb to
process the nectar, which means the queen can't lay! This isn't really a
problem in an established colony, they'll sort themselves out, but can
sometimes handicap a new colony. Imagine you are a swarm which builds a
hand-sized piece of comb ready for the queen to lay in... then some idiots fill
all the cells with nectar. Swarms have to balance their options and not do too
much of any one until they get to a critical mass of bees and comb, then they
can expand more recklessly and take advantage of whatever comes up.
Paul
‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐
On Monday, 23 September 2019 20:22, Gilliane Sills
<dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
One of my hTBHs is absolutely full of honey. I opened it last Friday and as
I prised off the last of the end bars furthest from the entrance, it came
away from the comb beneath and I could see that the comb was completely full.
I can't take any honey because of the cross combing further in to the hive
and the fact that removing a top bar breaks the honey-filled cells beneath,
and this makes a mess. Trying to get out the comb underneath would make a
really horrible mess and undoubtedly kill a number of bees, so I'm not going
to try this. However, I'm curious about how the bees manage when they
haven't got any more space available to fill? There's a lot of activity with
bees flying in and out and some clustering above the entrance, and they're
still bringing in pollen and the temperature above the top bars at the
entrance end suggests they still have brood. It must happen in the wild too
that sometimes they run out of space. Does anyone know what happens? Do the
bees fly less, or eat more honey, or just get stressed...? Though there's no
sign of them being stressed - they were surprisingly good-tempered when I
broke their comb (only one bee got angry) and they don't object to me being
close by.
Gilliane
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