Friday, 29 July 2016

Repairing a cock up

Bees like a self contained environment and when confronted with space in the hive they do one of two things.
If the gap is small they close it up with Propolis or if the gap is large they fill it up with comb.
When I collected the Little Staughton swarm I put a few drawn frames in the nuc box and added the bees. As there was nothing much I needed to do I left it.

However, when I checked it I found I had left too much space between one of the frames and the side of the nuc and the bees had filled it with comb. Despite what I said in an earlier blog, the nuc is now very full and I think I will have to transfer it to a full hive albeit I will probably have to pad it out while they fill it up.

I don't want to leave the 'filler' bit of comb behind so I need to transfer it somehow.
The same thing happened to me a few years ago and I cut the comb out of the nuc and tied it into an empty frame by threading lengths of rafia throufgh it and tying it off. The comb was very soft and it was very messy but it worked.
This time I thought I would do it a little differently by pinning the rafia to an empty frame so I can just slide the comb onto the frame and then tie it in with some more rafia.



No comments:

Post a Comment