13 bars will be fine! If your bees are calm and content they aren't worried
about starving.
By the way - if you heft the hive you can get an idea of how much honey they
have in there. Try lifting thehive at each end. Assuming you have an end
entrance the honey will be toward the entrance end, and you will notice that
the hive is much heavier at one end. You may even be able to guesstimate how
much honey is in there. If it's difficult to lift, you know they are doing OK!
My TBHs seem to overwinter fine with remarkably small stores, maybe 6kg
(imagine the weight of 6 bags of sugar). The BBKA goes on about needing 20kg
but we are not in Scotland, and if you aren't stimulating your queens with
massive feeding, or using Buckfasts, the bees will wind down their numbers for
winter and less mouths need less fuel.
What they'll be doing now is shuffling stores around, to create a continuous
belt of honey to munch through winter. There is one danger here: if your TBH is
a side entrance type, they may end up with 2 separated lumps of honey and this
risks "isolation starvation" if the winter is long and hard. I.e: when it is
really cold, bees can't move so need to stay in a cluster. If they eat all the
honey in one lump they can starve a few inches from the other lump.
In my experience, they'll be moving honey into the brood nest area, this is
where they prefer to overwinter. Right now they probably have 8 or more bars of
honey and the last few are nectar, which should be processed into honey shortly.
If you were to fiddle with the combs now you would, in order to pull combs out,
have to cut through brace comb (the bits which attach the main comb to the
walls of the hive). Apart from supporting the heavy, honey loaded combs this
performs another function: it's a draught excluder and keeps the hive much
warmer in winter. Conventional training teaches that you should cut this away
(along with propolis) as they make pulling combs out tricky, but actually it is
good to have.
So unless there is a good reason to, don't try to cut and move combs until
Spring. Right now they are packed with honey and prone to collapse. The bees
don't need help right now. But in Spring we need to move TBH bars to create
space for the brood nest, or it gets honey bound (see other email) and the bees
swarm prematurely. Lots of small swarms doesn't do anyone any good, you want a
few big ones 8) By Spring much of the honey will be eaten making the combs
easier to move.
Paul
‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐
On Monday, 23 September 2019 21:30, Kerry Dawson <kerrydawson99@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
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> 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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