Some of us
Just before
Hive inspection
Two weeks ago the group purchased a new five-frame nuc of bees for a national hive. The nuc came on frames with foundation but our intention is to keep these bees without foundation, so the brood box was filled with empty frames.
Today was the day to open up hive and see how they are doing.
Fantastic! We saw the Queen. And then we lifted a frame without foundation and to our delight the bees had built new comb within the frame, including a small teardrop shaped extension
We then moved on to check one of the top bar hives. In theory bees should build comb along the bars in a teardrop shape.
And sometimes they do this by the book
However, the bees don’t always read the books
And, for reasons best known to themselves, decide to build across the bars.
This is something we have encountered in all of our top bar hives and we are working to modify our top bars in order to rectify this. It doesn’t appear to be a problem for the bees, but it does hinder hive inspection.
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