Broken comb resulting in honey leak!

Beekeeping - Basics
1

Hi all, I just carried out an inspection of our hive today. Everything is looking great. A couple of SHB, looks like the trap is keeping them under control.
Upon inspection, I managed to rip off a chunk of comb, I think it was attached to the side of the box. It was a fair bit of damage. Should I be worried? Will the girls sort it out or do I need to do something?

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I wouldn’t worry too much. When it happens to me I scrape the bridging comb off the side and put the frame back.

(I’m assuming the frame was bridged to the side of the box and that’s what you’re referring to, not a collapse of a frame.)

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3

They will fix it up ok. If you take one frame out and leave it out during the inpection then you have more room to space the remaining frames while you check the others out. Less chance of damage , sqaushed bees and then less chance beetles breeding.

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4

I’ll Ok great. Thanks for your reassurance.
It was just bridging comb to the side of the box.
I’ll keep an eye on it.

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5

As @SnowflakeHoney and @Gaz said, the bees will fix it. I would just like to add a couple of thoughts to their excellent comments.

  1. If you tidy up the frames of bridge, burr and creative comb during inspections, this kind of damage becomes much less frequent. Just scrape it off with a hive tool
  2. When tidying excess comb, don’t throw it on the ground (encourages wax moths and SHB). I put mine into a ziplock baggie and freeze it until I have enough to render or spread onto new Flow frames if needed.
  3. Don’t deliberately drop the removed comb back into the hive. If it is heavy with honey, you may drown bees, and this might even include the queen. :blush:
  4. If you push your frames shoulder-to-shoulder together in the middle of the brood box, you will get less creative comb in the brood nest. You may get some up against the hive wall, but the queen isn’t often in these areas, so you are less likely to kill her off when you pull an edge frame out for inspection.

Sounds like you have a pretty good idea of what you are doing, so your bees should be fine. :wink:

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