NigelP wrote: ↑23 Jun 2019, 22:07
Adam Bee wrote: ↑23 Jun 2019, 19:10
First inspection in 2 weeks. All was fine. BIAS, Queen. 12 frames in the top box (still need to manufacture my dummy boards!) all drawn. Brood on 10 of them, many dotted with a few cells of nectar or pollen; a few with a band of capped honey on the top.
6 drawn frames in the middle of the bottom box, some with nectar. Lots and lots of bearding on the outer frames as they were drawing those out. I felt bad that I disturbed them by inspecting. No QC's. No apparent health issues. Not much honey, but that wasn't expected.
You need to go to double brood on that description...Queen is short of laying room.
And please go to 11 frames per brood box....long term it helps. Forget the dummy frame...you will find soon enough it'snot necessary.
Second brood box, I'd stick below and I'd move 4-5 frames of brood down and fill in above with undrawn or whatever you have. Sure others would do it differently.
Ah! Nigel, my bad for not being clear. I am running two brood boxes. That's the
6 drawn frames in the middle of the bottom box! Well, to be honest, I'm running two boxes, but with no QE, so she can use both as brood right now as she sees fit.
On the next inspection, I will remove one frame from each box. I should have done it this time, but didn't. Why? Dunno. I guess I thought I'd wait until I had a dummy board. But, it's clear that with so many bees, especially in that top box, there needs to be only 11 frames, even if there are no dummy boards.
Say - with the extra space, if there is no 12th frame and no dummy board, would you push all the frames against one end? Or balance the space and push the frames together in the middle of the box, distributing the space on either side?
Running "Foundationless All Mediums with No Queen Excluder". Each box is national spec, but 190mm deep.