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From:
James C Bach <[log in to unmask]>
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Date:
Sun, 22 Feb 1998 22:36:17 -0800
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Tom Speight, I am sorry to have missed meeting you.  I have many fond
memories of the beekeepers I met in the Kingdom.  What a wonderful time.
And Mary, what a wonderful lady.  Cumbria, what beautiful country!
 
Tom you wondered if my suggestion for comb manipulation with honey in the
middle of the first honey super limits the pollen stored over the brood
nest.  Yes, and intentionally so, though I sometimes wonder if we can
really cause bees to do anything.
 
In reality bees that are not behaviorly impaired store the majority of
their pollen below and to the sides of the brood rearing area (80%) with
pollen arches over the top of the brood rearing area (15%) and a few cells
scattered through the brood rearing area (5%) which is used up feeding
larvae in the vicinity.  Bees should not store pollen in the super above
the brood nest (2 deeps or 3 westerns) unless forced to do so by the way
beekeepers manipulate combs.  The storage of pollen above the brood nest is
one of the 16 aberrant behaviors we see in bees nowadays that we did not
see 15 years ago, except on rare occasions.  In fact I have seen bees put
three to four solid combs of pollen directly above the brood rearing area
even though they had an empty deep or so below the brood nest.  I've also
seen bees store a full deep of honey below the brood nest when they had
four westerns of open comb above the brood nest.
 
This leads right into the recent comments on hive entrances and how bees
use them.  Years ago I removed a lot of bee colonies from building walls
and trees.  In the majority of cases the hive entrance was above the brood
rearing area and below the honey storage area.  The only exceptions I
observed were in broken off snag trees which only had a top entrance, or in
building walls where the entrance hole was close to the top of a wall.  If
the bees had access to holes with equal amounts of open space above and
below the entrance hole, they always put their brood nest below the
entrance.  This has obvious implications about their need to control air
movement through the brood nest to preserve heat, and the need to ripen
honey at the top of the nest.
 
When I use wood wrapped queen excluders I cut a 5/16 x 1.25 in. entrance
above the excluder grid in the center of the front of the excluder.  If I
use metal wrapped excluders, and sometimes with wood, I just set the
excluder back from the front of the hive by 1.25 in.  This allows bees to
readily enter the brood nest or super around the end of the excluder
without going through the excluder.   Once the bees put honey in the center
six combs of the first super I remove the excluder but set the honey supers
back one inch to achieve the entrance.
 
I have closed down the bottom entrance to one inch or so, or I now use a
Bovard rack, more commonly called a slatted rack (the same principle as a
Killian bottom board) between the bottom brood nest box and the bottom
board (hive floor).  This allows the bees to keep the brood nest warmer and
approximates their preference in nature.  They react favorably by not
removing the comb from the bottom of the bottom combs.  They will also
raise swarm cells along the bottom bars of the bottom combs.  I must be
warm enough for them down there.
 
The above bee behavior is why I have never favored holes in the front of
hive boxes below the hand holes.  In fact I have seen numerous times that
the bees would only put brood to the back of the brood nest in such cases.
In some situations I suspected that their behavior was caused by strong
prevailing winds at the front of the hive, but I have also seen it occcur
in the fall with the wind coming from the side of hives.  At times bees
will reduce the hole size with propolis even down to one bee space.  The
described behavior also has implications for colony cluster size, laying
space for the queen, and ultimate colony size at the beginning of the honey
flow.
 
 
James C. Bach
WSDA State Apiarist
Yakima WA
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509 576 3041

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