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Hive expansion

This post comes a little late, since I have done a few things since my last post. On the 2nd of April, I moved all the bees from the old hive bodies from my mentor to my own hive bodies. The move was for the most part quick and easy. My focus was to be sure to place the frames in the hives so that the brood nest was in the center of the hive body. Doing this ensures that bees will be expanding toward the outer edges. If the brood nest is not centered, the bees may go into early swarm behavior as they do not like to go over the edges of the food frames. I also removed a few older frames that were too short for my hive bodies and replaced them with wax foundations or with drawn-out comb.

On the 15th of April, I decided to expand all the hives by giving each a second brood chamber. The weather from the time I moved them in to the time I expanded the hive was quite pleasant for April. The cherry blossoms were appearing, which is the time to expand. At this point, I had decided to just give the colonies a second brood chamber, and wait until the canola begins to blossom before giving them a honey super. I configured the second brood chamber in the following manner (position numbers are from left to right):
  • Positions 1 - 4: Wax foundations
  • Positions 5 - 7: Drawn-out honeycomb
  • Position 8: Empty drone frame 
  • Position 9: Drawn-out honeycomb
  • Position 10: Wax foundation 
The next day was Easter Sunday, and it started to get cold. Monday and Tuesday we had snowfall and a lot of wind. The weather started to improve during the week, but it still was rainy and windy, temperatures never really got above 10°C. On Thursday, I stopped by to check on the colonies and the bees were flying in full force with an outside temperature of 6°C! But because of the cold snap, brood production had slowed down.

Yesterday(April 24th) I looked through the colonies and made some more modifications, weather was pleasant at 14°C with blue skies. Colony 3 still had an old drone frame from last season that was 60% filled with capped drone brood. I removed the frame and place the empty drone frame from the second brood chamber in its place (position 3). All 3 colonies were in good shape, with a large brood nest over 6 frames. I saw the queens of colonies 1 and 2. I also removed a left over food frame from colony 2 and replaced it with a frame of drawn-out honeycomb. I also placed the drone frames into the lower chamber of colonies 1 and 2 (at position 8), as they both were beginning to raise a lot of drones. None of the colonies had really begun to populate the second brood chamber, the weather just hasn't been good enough for them to really start busting out at the seams. Better weather is on the way, so I expect the second brood chambers to be populated withing the next couple of weeks. Hopefully they will be strong enough at that time for me to give each of them a honey super. If the bees begin storing only nectar in the drawn-out honeycomb in the second brood chamber, then I may just place the queen excluders on and let the bees carry on with storing honey, I will make that decision this weekend.

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