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Subject: Orange County, NC Beekeepers

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  • From: Cole Rizki <colerizki AT gmail.com>
  • To: "ocba AT lists.ibiblio.org" <ocba AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [ocba] hive question: population strong, no food stores
  • Date: Mon, 1 Jun 2015 11:39:14 -0400

Hi all,

 

I have a question about my current hive. Right now, I’m stacked two deeps with a medium super on top for honey. I have a really strong queen who is laying wall to wall, but that’s precisely the problem: both my deeps are totally packed full of brood, the bee population is booming but there are almost zero honey or pollen stores (the medium super that I threw on two weeks ago is totally empty still). I see very little pollen and almost no honey: the hive has zero storage at this point and the two deeps are totally slammed with bees and brood. The population is so strong with no food stores that I’m concerned about a swarm and/or starvation. What should I do?

 

My first thought is to perform a split and throw top feeders on both of the resulting hives. I only have one hive at present, so the split would leave me with another hive in case one of the hives is failing and I need to trouble shoot. I imagine that the other option would be to get the queen into the bottom deep and throw a queen excluder between the two deeps to prevent her from laying in the top deep (and throw on a top feeder, of course), but this second option would leave me with one hive in the end. What do folks think?

 

Thanks for your input,

Cole




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