Today we have added a new brood box to hive #1.
The typical hive used here are Langstroth style hives. These hives have 10 frames for bees to either raise new babies, live on, and store food (honey and pollen). Brood boxes (where the babies are raised, the queen lives, and the nurse bees spend their times), are typically “deep” boxes or about 10 inches tall.
We use pre-formed frames, where a plastic or wax sheet with honeycomb shapes are already printed in it. These help guide the bees where to build new wax comb. In nearly every hive we have raised, the bees will start at one side of the box. Typically 1 or 2 frames in, and begin building their colony. Eventually, when they cover 8 frames, they will stop, and generally ignore the outer frames. They seem to like maintaining a square shape in a rectangle box.
The goal here is to build up a large number of bees. This hive is not ready to collect or produce honey. There aren’t enough bees yet!
The bottom brood box is hatching new bees. That we saw at the last inspection. The queen is sluggish on laying new eggs. Lots of bees are going to hatch all at the same time.
Today we added an empty brood box on under the full brood box. Trying something new, bees have been reported to like to grow their hives downward, with honey stored at the top, and new comb drawn down. Just like us – They store things for winter in the attic (the honey).
We are also going to keep periodic feeding them sugar and pollen to help build up their number for late summer. With the wet rainy spring, we are predicting a damp, flower filled, nectar flowing, flower happy late summer and fall.