i was trying to build up a hive, and now i have x3 brood boxes with flow hive on top.
the ladies are putting honey into the flow hive.
so i checked the brood boxes yesterday…the second and third are full of honey…man they are heavy, i did not lift the second box so i did not look at the bottom box. my question is why are the ladies making honey +++ and not babies in the extra brood boxes i gave them
The bees are not making as many babies as you’d like because of the ratio of honey vs pollen they are gathering. I don’t know where in the world Cottles Bridge is, however during the springtime is when the most pollen comes in. That’s when colonies numbers really expand to swarming strength.
I my little piece of paradise I only run single brood boxes, which gives a decent size population if I manage them properly.
cheers
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A triple brood box hive is probably a ‘bridge too far’ for just one queen to populate so the colony has used some of that excess space to store honey.
With your climate you should have a happy hive with just a double brood hive both for an 8 or 10 frame brood and will survive the harshest of Victoria’s Winters. What I would do is remove one of the brood boxes full of honey, probably the top one, and extract it so that the bees have less alternatives than the Flow Super to store the honey.
What I would do then, and it is only what I would do, is buy a new base board and migratory roof and take a split off the hive and boost it with frames of brood from the other hives, there is still time to have a strong hive before the weather changes.
Cheers
Dennis, I am a little further south than my fellow QLD beekeepers here but not as far south as you. For my Flow hive, the flow super is the only honey storage that I give my bees, and so they have no alternative but to use it. I do find frames of honey in their brood box occasionally and this is then immediately swapped out for a frame of foundation which keeps them busy and the queen gets a new laying area.
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