Honey Super Cell Experiment

Today’s experience/experiment was very interesting.

I have a western honey bee hive I am managing at my friend’s house, and I am trying to get it regressed down to a small cell size hive. I had previously put in 4.9 mm foundation, but these bees reworked the foundation to a larger cell size.

Not so long ago, I added a super of foundation to it and moved some frames around to give the queen more space to lay in and the bees more space to store honey and pollen. The only result I could see is that all of a sudden it appeared that the bees had stopped working and I could no longer see any entrance activity.

A few days ago I went through the hive again to see what is going on and could only find bees on/covering about 3 frames in the middle super although I had 3 supers on the hive. I checked the frames that used to have brood and there was some “dead brood” that had little “shot holes” in the tops of some of the unemerged cells and some cells with dead bees that looked like they died in the cells after trying to come out. It bothered me and I wondered if this might not be a sign of some kind of brood disease.

After thinking about what I could or should do about it, I decided to move the colony onto honey super cell fully drawn out plastic 4.9 mm comb (mine is black colored to make it easier to see when the queen has started laying eggs in it).

To prepare the Honey Super Cell (HSC) combs, I followed the advice I had heard and read about preparing them by putting honey into the cells before putting them into the hive. I did that to 3 frames, and put them into a 3 frame nucleus hive. I then took the original hive off the hive stand and placed the nucleus hive in its location. Next I started taking out combs and brushing bees off into the nucleus hive.

I gently brushed the queen off into the nucleus hive too, but she did not appear to like it and did not go inside. She crawled onto the outside of the hive and I tried to use the bee brush to coax her back in, when to my dismay, she started to fly into the air and fly around in a circular fashion back and forth. I watched her and tried to get her to come back (mental telepathy?) but she would have none of it and finally I lost track of her as she flew away. The only thing I could do at that point was to finish brushing the rest of the bees into the hive and hope the queen would come back and rejoin them on her own.

I finally got all the frames of honey and stores and what little brood there was hauled into the woodworking area where the rest of my beekeeping equipment is being stored. I plan to extract honey from those frames later. I went back a couple of times while doing this to check and see how it looked at the nucleus hive. At first the bees clustered on the face of the hive above and below the entrance, but after some time I could see that it looked like they had moved inside, so I assumed that the queen had probably returned.

When I finally got everything cleaned up and put away and ready to leave and had put the things I was going to take back home with me into the basket on the back of my bicycle, I decided to take one final look at the hive, and it is a good thing I did. What I found was a pile of bees on the ground behind the hive with more bees joining it as I watched. Bees were leaving the hive and joining the pile on the ground (a circular pile) and the bees on the ground were fanning with their Nasanov glands extruded, so I assumed that the queen had returned and was in that pile on the ground.

I went back and got my bee suit and gloves on and also found a piece of screen with the right sized mesh to use as a “queen includer” over the entrance so the queen could not leave. I then took the lid off the hive, scooped up a large handful of bees (including the queen which I could see in the middle of the pile) into my gloved hands, and put them into the hive. I then put the top back on the hive and thumbtacked the screen over the hive entrance. I feel much better now that maybe my experiment will possibly be a success.
The brood comb I could see the queen on earlier had just a few eggs laid in it and a small amount of open brood, but not much sealed brood, so that is not too much to lose, and she should be able to lay more very soon (as soon as the workers clean the honey out of some of the HSC cells and prepare them for her to lay in).

There is still lots of fall flower bloom available and it is only mid October, so there should be enough time for them to raise some new bees to overwinter. I can feed them if I have to in order to help get them through the winter, but I felt that if I cannot get them downsized to the 4.9 mm cell size before winter that they might not make it through the winter anyway.

Well, it is an experiment after all, so I’ll just have to see how it will turn out. I felt a lot better when I left today than I had felt after watching the queen fly off earlier. The other hive, although smaller, has smaller bees that had drawn out the 4.9 mm foundation correctly and seems to be doing fine. They have a lot of entrance activity and are bringing in a lot of pollen and stores so I think they should do fine.