>>>>>In the course of this I noticed several hives that had bees on the
middle three or four frames evenly distributed between the bottom and
top deep.

This is quite normal for bees to do. The cluster will move upwards as
winter progresses. The bees eat the stores as they move up. When the
colony is ready to start brooding, the queen will lay in the cluster.
The cluster is usually still up high when this occurs and so that's
where she lays if the comb is suitable.

>>>>>In another ten days or so I'll be doing a real manipulation - and
I'm wondering if I should "rebuild" the brood nest into one box.

You can do either, but many people are enjoying the benefits of an
UnlimitedBroodNest which is what you have the beginnings of. Since the
bee move up and down the column of the hive, the queen will lay in the
center of all the boxes. You can often get a lot more bees for the honey
flow this way and people have been enjoying increased honey flow
production because of this. When an UnlimitedBroodNest becomes genuinely
mature, you generally leave 2 or 3 deeps (or the equivilent volume in
mediums) on for thw hole season, winter included. If you really like to
get into the hives, and harvest as much honey as you can, then you can
pull the honey combs from the sides of each box if they haven't laid it
up with brood. They very often leave 2 frames on either side of the
brood as honey stores only. Or if you like to leave the bees with
something, leave the honey there alone and just harvest from the top,
which is where the honey will go if you leave the honey below alone. If
you choose to pull honey from the sides, you will always be pulling
honye from the sides, because that is where the bees are going to put it
first before they put it above (in a mature ULBN).

Its your choice, depends on what you want to do. I would leave them as
they are, and put a super on top if they are ready for it, and just
harvest what you get this season, next winter leave another chamber of
winter stores on top, and you may have yourself a 3 chamber
UnlimitedBroodNest which many ULBN beekeepers believe is ideal. Its all
up to you. I thinkt he bees will be more productive if you give them
their space which they developed the way they and nature intended.

Scot Mc Pherson
Bradenton Bees
http://beewiki.linuxfromscratch.org
http://groups.yahoo.com/groups/OrganicBeekeepers/
mailto:[log in to unmask]


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