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Subject: Orange County, NC Beekeepers

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Chronological Thread  
  • From: Walter Starks <walterstarks AT icloud.com>
  • To: Chris Cramer <chris.cramer AT gmail.com>
  • Cc: ocba AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [ocba] Comb under the hive?
  • Date: Sat, 22 Jul 2017 11:26:52 -0400

You can remove the comb similar to a cut out. Place it in special hinged frames or empty frames wrapped with a couple of rubber bands. And re-insert it into an empty hive. Once it builds up a little you can do a newspaper combine with your laying worker hive.

______

Walter


You never can tell with bees. ~ Winnie-the-Pooh

On Jul 22, 2017, at 9:41 AM, Chris Cramer <chris.cramer AT gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Folks,

I could use some advice.  I was recently doing a hive inspection and one hive looks great, no problems there.  The other hive was showing signs of not having a queen, in particular, there’s at least one laying worker and lots of spotty drone brood.  I grabbed a frame of brood from my good hive and put it in, in hopes that they would produce a queen.  But then I noticed that what I had thought was bearding under the screened bottom board was actually comb.  Today I got a slightly closer look at the comb and it appears to have brood in a nice laying pattern.

My guess is that the queen fell out during an inspection and couldn’t get back in, but the workers started building her comb on the underside of the hive.  

So now what?  My thought is to remove the hive from the hive stand, put a large bucket or container under the hive stand and give it a good thump on the ground to knock all of the bees into the container, put them in the main hive and sacrifice the brood that’s in the comb beneath the hive.

Alternatively, I could cut out the screened bottom board and staple it into a box in the main hive and hope they sort things out, migrating back to the frames when possible.

Thoughts?  Any advice is appreciated

thanks
-chris
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