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 [log in to unmask] [log in to unmask] 509 576 3041