I don't want to give the Parent Hive any brood from the Daughter Hive for fear of weakening the Daughter Hive. I know it sounds a bit callous, but I'd prefer go into winter with one really good hive and one weak one, rather than two good-ish ones!
So, how to make the Daughter Hive as strong as possible? Well I want to get the honey that is in the supers into the hive bodies. I've tried putting an inner cover between the hive bodies and the supers and that didn't work, so I'll try something different. This time I'll put the super with the most honey on a screened bottom board and put the hive bodies on top of this. The other super I will remove and store for the winter. It may be interesting to see what happens for a couple of weeks.
Before I do this I think I may do another sticky board count!
STOP PRESS: Some work has been done on the supers as there definitely seemed to be less honey in them today (Sunday 12th) than the last time I checked. Nevertheless, I made the adjustments as above. Perhaps I tried to get the bees to move the honey too early? We'll have to see how quickly they deal with the remaining honey. I guess out of the other super, one frame had a reasonable amount of honey in it. I removed and froze all the frames from this super.
I am definitely interested to know if putting the honey super below the hive body causes the bees to pull the honey up into the hive, or if they simply cluster around it first going into the winter, and then work their way back up higher.
ReplyDelete