I have am 8-frame flow with 2 brood boxes and the super on at the moment. The bee population has exploded lately, so I’m hoping for a bit of insight. I’m in boston and the temp has been low 80s lately and around 30-40% humidity. At night there are THOUSANDS of bees all over the front and sides of the hive. Here is a picture from my NEST:
It’s been like this every single night (even when the temp is in the 60s) for 6-8 weeks. During the day it’s much less, but still bearding and fanning all day. Should I be worried about swarming?
If an in hive inspection show no sign of swarm cells you might try adding a ventilation box on top of the upper honey box. They simply give a more fluent air flow for cooling and honey capping.
Make sure to move bees around during inspection. Sometime the bees will be covering swarm cells and they can be hard to detect.
Good luck!
Quick question Busso on bearding. We did our first harvest from the super on top of the brood. Owing to not having an extractor at the time, we were advised by a local bee keeper to super up, so we added the flow frames as the red gum are flowering. The flow frames had been on for two weeks prior to us getting the extractor after which we lifted FF off, took off the middle super and replaced the FF’s. Since that time the bearding on the front of the hive has been enormous and I am wondering if there might not be enough room for the bees in the hive as the FF’s are full of bees working on filling them. It has not been warm enough down here in Pemberton to worry about them bearding because of the heat, so just hoping that they are not going to nick off on me. Any suggestions please.
We caught a swarm just outside this hive a few weeks before Christmas which now has a full brood, almost completely full super and we have just added a 2nd super today.
It’s not the thing to add a super onto a FF I presume and I don’t want to disturb them anymore and pull the hive apart and add a 2nd super under the FF, unless you think that might work also. If I did this I would leave this super on for the winter.
Any advice is appreciated.