Hi, my colony from a swarm in May, has occupied 13 bars of my TBH and has not
expanded on this number for several weeks. They have cross-combed, so not easy
to inspect. Following some colder weather two weeks ago, I moved the empty
bars to the other side of the follower to reduce the space available to the
colony and added a sawdust quilt above the bars, in readiness for Winter. The
bees are very calm and content – lots of flying and collecting pollen. My
question is will 13 bars be sufficient to see them through the winter and/or
should I give them back some more space?
Kerry
From: oxnatbees-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx <oxnatbees-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf
Of Paul Honigmann
Sent: 23 September 2019 20:59
To: oxnatbees@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [oxnatbees] Re: hive full of honey
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<mailto: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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