Swapping Warre hive boxes
In the wild,
honeybees start at the top of a cavity and build their comb
straight down. When we add supers on top of a Langstroth
hive, we're asking our bees to do something counterintuitive, and
sometimes they balk, especially if you're asking bees to build
without foundation. Warre hives usually prevent this problem
since you nadir (add boxes below) instead of super (add boxes
above), but the first few weeks after package installation, I
generally see the same issue. Which is all a long way of
explaining why I opened up the hive rather than just putting a new
box underneath when a photo up through the bottom showed that the
bottom box, at least, was crammed full of comb.
Sure enough, the top
box was completely empty...except for two bits of comb that the
bees had started building up from top bars of the box below.
I scraped away those pieces of comb, put the quilt onto this full
box (now the top box), and added the empty box underneath. I
didn't perform this swap last year, and I suspect that's why I
ripped comb apart when I finally opened up the hive to inspect in
September.
I think the technique
for installing
a package in a Warre hive could be tweaked to prevent the need to swap the
boxes a couple of weeks in. Or perhaps I should just
automatically swap the boxes when I take
out the queen cage a couple of days later. I'll ponder that for the
future, and will enjoy our happy bees for now.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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