Cells built hanging from queen excluder

I’m new to this so I realize now that I made a mistake by leaving any room between frames when I first installed my bees. Unfortunately, rather than building cells from any of the many frames they had to choose from, they built it hanging down from the queen excluder. I found this out as I was removing the queen excluder to have a check after several weeks of leaving them undisturbed. The comb broke off as I removed the excluder and while it is still standing fairly upright, is leaning against a frame. I adjusted it as well as I could to make sure they can access all the cells with new bees in them. Any other suggestions on what to do? I didn’t want to just remove it, since there are tons of eggs and larvae and honey as well. Big Oops! Good news is that my queen is doing well and laying lots of eggs and they have honey to eat!

Put the comb into the empty frames and hold it in place with rubber bands maybe.
Not going to ask why you had a queen excluder in place.

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What’s the issue with cdet running an excluder?

This is a good example of why it’s useful to have some standard frames above your excluder. You can place the comb in a frame with rubber bands as suggested and place the frame above the excluder (making sure you backfill the gap with a frame in the lower box). This way you can wait for the brood to hatch out and cycle the frame out of the hive without the queen re-laying in it.

@RBK, cdet said these were newly installed bees on foundationless frames.
Unless I’ve misread that, I can’t think of any reason to have anything in place to exclude the queen from yet, so as a betting man, I’d wager she prematurely placed the Flow super on the colony.
She may just be doing what she thinks is right or has been told to do so. One of the clubs I’m in has been advising to add supers as the flow is on, but without any caveats pertaining to colony size or strength.

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Thank you for the advice Bobby and RBK. I will try using the rubber bands. Yes, the honey super is in place now so I’ll take that off as well.

Like this @cdet!

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Hi Christine, you can use elastic bands to hold comb in place in an empty frame that has already been suggested. Just make sure the comb your trying to save is worker comb & not drone comb. If you evenly space your frames, say 2-3mm between each frame & both sides you’ll be right. Make sure, like you said, that no comb is touching each other. Also make sure you don’t leave any dead or trapped bees behind. Mainly to stop shb laying eggs.

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Looks like the band’s that I use to hold the chicken wings in tight when I use the set it and forget it rotisserie oven! LOL. Great idea.:smiley: