Followup question… my nuc came with frames with plastic foundation. How do I determine what foundation was used? I might not want any foundation that tries to force 100% worker cells. My plan in the long run is to have 100% foundationless frames, but, I would love to know what I am working with today.
And… if I do have a foundation that is sized for workers only, should I expect more errant comb as bees try to squeeze in some drone cells?
However, if you use foundation, rather than foundationless frames, you risk your queen moving up in the hive - which brings us back to the original concept of how to keep the queen out of the Flow super, if you don’t want to use a queen excluder… You might be better off not using foundation…
While foundationless allows the bees to set up the hive how they want my four box hive had brood in the centre frames in the top box this year. I would only put a flow box on a STRONG hive in a flow and only above a QE or you are asking for a lot of work.
I used a queen excluder for the last 3 weeks to move some brood out of a medium and into the deeps below. I had a top and bottom entrance. When I took the excluder off there were a few dozen drones that had strangled themselves to death trying to navigate between the boxes.
Excluders are a useful tool, but unnecessary for making honey with the correct sized brood nest imo.
I just wanted to say…in regard to drone brood…I have always found that the colony will have drone brood whether you use wax foundation or not…they will build drone cells on it…so there isn’t a reason to worry about them. I use a mixture of foundation and free wax comb. Sometimes in the super they build what looks like drone cells but they fill them with honey…it is more efficient to build drone size cells as they use less wax.
Maybe so, I have never tried that with cocoons. I just know my experience with propolis is always sticky and dirty, so I assumed cocoons would be the same!
A lot of stigma around queen excluders is unjustified… you need to understand the constraints around using an excluder in a new hive, which a lot of people ignore.
IME (in my experience… start with a caveat) the issue is that people place a queen excluder in a new hive and then blame the excluder when bees haven’t moved up. Usually the conclusion is quickly drawn that there is something wrong with the excluder, when the bees haven’t been incentivised to move up through the excluder.
In a standard Langstroth configuration (1 brood, 1 super) there are several ways to achieve this. Start without an excluder and wait for frames to be drawn, then pack the queen down into the lower box, introduce the excluder and wait for the brood to hatch out of the top box (super). Having brood in the top box encourages the nurse bees up through the excluder which in turn brings others up. The net result is that you also have drawn comb ‘ready to go’ above the excluder which the bees will happily backfill. This isn’t a great option for Flow super as others have mentioned above… brood cocoons in your Flow frames probably isn’t going to be a fun problem to resolve.
Another method is to start out with an excluder, and when the brood frames have good coverage, shake the bees off half the frames (or 2 or 3 frames) and interleave (checker) them with other frames in the top box. Once again this results in brood being above the excluder which encourages the bees up.
Unfortunately I can’t speak from direct experience with the Flow frames, but I would approach it similar to the interleaving solution above. If I was running full super of Flow frames I would pull a couple out initially and place in standard Langstroth frames. When there was dense brood coverage below I would swap the Langstroth frames out of the brood box with the Langstroth frames in the top box/super, and even interleave them between the Flow frames. This will encourage the bees up into the top box through the excluder, where they can start filling the Langstroth frames (after the brood hatches) and then start filling the Flow frames. When the Langstroth frames are full, or you are getting some honey in the Flow frames, you can swap in your other Flow frames again.
Note: you can (will) have issues with trapped drones if your brood frame contains drone comb and you don’t have an escape/entrance above the installed excluder. I haven’t had the issue of trapped drones when a top escape is made available as Red_Hot_Chillipepper describes, but it is something to be conscious of.
Hi, I installed my package of bees but when I pulled the queen cage out of the package it was open. Is the queen there if they are building comb or does there have to be larva in the cells?
If the queen is intact she will lay that comb up straight away. If you are confident you can see eggs have a look. If not then leave it a week when you should see larvae. I have caught swarms that built and laid up bits of comb in three hours.
