Hi there,
I’ve been running my flowhive for 2nd years I’m enjoying so far and they so much more to learn.
I have a 2-brood box hive from last season with a small backyard during the peak seasons the bees can get quite aggressive specially we interfere with their flight path. I thinking to downsizing the hive this season by reducing it from 2 brood to 1. I did an inspection the top brood are mainly nectar and honey, I placed the QX in between the 2 boxes that would make the top box a super overtime, thus downsizing the 2 brood hive to a single brood hive.
Could anyone advise if this is safely done without risking swarming where the queen run of of space(cells) to lay.
Your plan seems doable as long as you monitor the bottom box for signs of swarming and do preemptive splits. I imagine you could swap out frames of brood from the lower box with frames of honey in the upper, making two separate colonies this way. They would need to have their own placement with another bottom board and lid of course.
Just a thought, if your bees were aggressive at peak seasons, not just accidentally stinging you because of collisions, requeening might be worth considering (rather than having two mean hives!)
I’ve in fact re-queened last year and it was better but I’ll a feeling that it will gonna another massive season for the hive hence the plan to downsizing the brood from 2 to 1.
I have no intention of running 2 colonies(hives), don’t think I have enough space. If swarming or colony expansion is inevitable I consider splitting them for nuc either giving them away or selling them.
One brood and double hone super above a QE is the common Lang configuration in WA. You can reduce congestion in the brood box by moving capped brood above the queen and placing drawn, foundation or foundationless frames in the brood box.
That’s a good idea to reduce congestion and maintain the colony size, do you move the capped brood frame up to the top super box and replace it with a new frame or you swap a nectar/honey frame on the super box with the capped brood frame from the brood box?
Your wanting to create space in the brood box so an empty drawn frame is best, a partially filled frame next, then a foundation and last foundationless.
You can also remove the outer frame of the brood box when it is filled with honey and replace with an empty frame too.