Spring clean of hives completed

In glorious sunshine I managed to finish the spring clean of all my hives.  Each hive now has a clean open mesh floor, brood box and crown board. All hives are on one and half brood boxes ( A National Brood box and a Super acting as a brood box ) I have found all my colonies have come through winter very strong and I have bees over all the frames. The remaining fondant was not being taken, so I have removed this as there is still plenty of honey stores, plus I saw cells filled with new nectar. I will keep an eye on this, should the weather turn for the worst.

As it was warm and in bright sunshine, I as was able to take my time looking through each frame as I transfered them from the old to the new brood box. Brood was generally on 8 sides of the frames. Some just starting to have small areas of brood on the 9th and 10th side.  I also saw a smattering of capped drone brood cells, but these were not many and were within the main brood areas.  I have placed a shallow frame of drawn comb within each of the main National brood boxes. These will act as drone nurseries in a few weeks time, as the queen will lay her drone brood hanging from the bottom of these shallow frames. Once capped, I will cut off this drone brood and dispersed of it. ( freeze it to kill varroa then feed to the birds ) Drone brood is the perfect nursery for the varroa mite and this method is a good way to aid control of varroa within a hive. However you must remove the drone as soon as it is capped, otherwise you will have an infestation of varroa mite.

The general rule is once you see bees on the tops of 7 frames, add a super.  My bees are over more frames than this, even though they are on one and half brood boxes.  However though keen to add a super, it is still cold at night here in Norfolk.  I have therefore added a queen excluder, covered it with 2 overlapping sheets of newspaper then added the super.  The bees will chew through the paper if they wish to enter the super, but in the mean time the newspaper will act as an insulation layer between the brood box and the super.  On 3 hives which I added supers last week, the bees have chewed through and are now up in the super.

For more details in these methods see the chapters in the book.  www.beekeeping-book.com

See images below with captions