I ordered the full flow hive, brood and super, and installed a nuc in late April. Once the bees filled out 6.5 of the frames and started drawing on the 8th frame, I added a second brood box above the existing one. However, because Flow was sold out of their brood boxes, I ordered one from Brushy Mountain. Fast forward a month later, and the bees are building brace comb that connects the frames in the bottom to the frames in the top. I’m wondering if there are any people out there running 2 Flow brood boxes and if they fit snug enough together that there is no brace comb. If that’s the case I’ll just buy a Flow brood box, but if it’s not I may look at elevating the bottom frames a little to bring them closer to the top frames.
I have 2 brood boxes on my Flow hive - one from Flow and one Bee Thinking (who are now out of business). My bees are not currently doing what you describe, but I have seen that frequently in my other hives. I usually just leave it alone, or take the wax for rendering if it is really messy. If they are drone cells, make sure you inspect them for varroa. Brace comb is not something you can prevent, and it really isn’t a big problem.
I would not mess with the bee space by elevating the frames. You could cause problems for the queen trying to move between frames, seriously impacting her laying pattern.
Great, thank you for the information Dawn. The only real problem I have with it is that it prevents me from doing an inspection without breaking it all. Do you just inspect your brace comb hives less frequently than the others? I don’t fancy the idea of disturbing their progress too much :-/
I generally just scrape brace comb off when inspecting. If you leave it too long it makes pulling frames and boxes really difficult. Don’t worry, your bees are just doing what most bees do.
