Hive Stand and Burr Comb

Interesting day with the bees, so I thought I’d just do an update…

I am officially completely confused again.  I’ll get to the reason a bit later… but indeed, I started out by building some hive stands.  Firstly, my previous pallet stands looked stupid.  They barely kept the hive off the ground and were quickly overtaken by weeds.  Washington is up on some lovely white trash cinder blocks, and yet my delicate sense of aesthetics couldn’t handle it.

The parameters were:

• Must look somewhat less crappy that pallets, plastic sheet, and cinder blocks.
• Must not require a trip to the store.

That seemed like a good place to start.  Sturdiness was desirable, but not required.  It’s not how you feel, it’s how you look.

That meant scrounging for wood and coming up with a simple design that would allow for ventilation, hoist the hive up about a foot, and allow for some anti-ant measures (e.g., my favorite Tanglefoot on duct tape trick).  As it is, they just have too many paths up into the hive to control.

Long story short:

Adams On Its New Hive Stand

Regal, don’t you think?  By making the base the standard dimensions of the hive bodies, the bottom board rests right on top of it.  The pressure treated 2×4s in the front and 2×6s in the back are perpendicularly oriented for greater stability.  A full hive can be several hundred pounds.  The frame itself is just 1×6 since it supports the weight vertically.  The whole thing is screwed together with 2″ deck screws.  It feels like you could support an elephant on it.

Now, note the snazzy color on the stand frame.  Note also that the Adams hive body is bare naked.  That’s because I was panicking, and what does panic do?  It KILLS!  By now, I’ve calmed down, and I thought, what the heck, I’m painting anyway, I’ll just paint all my new boxes, too.  So I dug out some leftover paint, and voila!

Scandinavian Design Hive

Oh yeah… we’ve got your orangey brown leftover paint color and your creamy yellow leftover paint color.  They actually go quite nicely together and with the PT legs, which are darkish rust brown.  Right?  I’m right, right?

So, after all the assembly and painting was done, I wanted to accomplish two more things… get Adams off the ground, and remove some nasty burr comb that I saw when I was in Washington yesterday.  What’s burr comb?  I’m glad you asked.

Burr Comb And Drone Brood To Boot

That is burr comb.  It’s comb that they draw out where there’s too much room (more than the 3/8″ ‘bee space’).  See those bumps?  Those are drone brood cells.  Drones are useless, piggy males that just make a big mess and get in the way.  Since the girls know this, they tend to keep them out on the periphery.  This burr comb was stuck to the inner wall of one of Washington’s brood boxes.  You’ll also see a little finger sticking out on the lower right… let’s zoom in!

Is That A Swarm Cell Or Are You Just Happy To See Me

That little stalagtite/peanut lookin thing is a swarm cell… or a supercedure cell… I don’t know the difference, frankly.  In any case, it’s a new queen waiting to happen.  Given that it’s capped, she’s probably not too far from coming out– except that I squished her.  We already have a queen, thanks.  There was actually several on here.  I mentioned that I hadn’t seen any in Washington; that was because I couldn’t see the bottom of this burr comb well.

Hillbilly Hive with Swapped Out Brood Box

I moved the frames from that box, one at a time, into one of the newly painted boxes and closed it back up.  Then, I scraped all that comb off the wall of the old box (and painted it).  There was quite a chunk, and it was loaded with honey.  I took a big piece and put it in front of Washington:

Honey Laden Comb? No, Thank You.

And a smaller piece in front of Adams:

Honey Laden Comb? You Betcha!

Here’s where I get a little confused.  In a couple of minutes, that piece in front of Adams was absolutely covered in bees and starting to look mighty cleaned out.  The comb in front of Washington just sat there.  There was maybe a dozen or two bees on it… seemingly just walking around.  Why is that?    I left it there for some hours, and they never got worked up about it.  I ended up adding some to Adams, and they covered that, too.  Adams is queenless.  Maybe that has something to do with it.  Maybe Washington is getting ready to swarm again and isn’t hungry because they’re all full already.  I don’t think so, though.  The queen is laying and they show little indication of getting ready that I can see.

Any theories, anyone?