8 Tricks To Encourage Your Bees To Build More Comb EVEN IN JULY! #beekeeping

so i have nine new hives and every single one of them has had to start from no comb so i thought what better thing to talk about than how to get your bees to dry out comb faster so first we need to understand how the bees even makes make wax to begin with so there are eight plates on the stomach of a bee that are responsible for excreting a liquid that will then later solidify into the wax that they use to build the comb and each worker bee in the hive has a different job depending on how old they are so the bees that are drawing out the wax and building the comb are actually all less than two weeks old so that being said you need to have an active queen that is laying so that you are constantly bringing in new bees new young bees that are two weeks or younger that are able to make this wax so the more young bees you have the quicker they're going to be able to build that comb because the more hands they're going to have on building it and something that is good to remember is that these are extremely efficient so they're not going to draw out that comb unless they have to building comb requires a lot of energy so they also need a lot of food in order to do that so if you have new hives that you're needing to build out the comb honestly it's a good idea to feed when there's not a lot of nectar coming in or if you have a lot of a lot of bee hives and there's they're all competing for that small amount of nectar that's in the area then it's a really good idea to feed your bees so that they have that energy to build the comb so bees generally draw the most comb from april until june because that is when a huge surge of nectar starts flowing into their hive so that they have enough energy in order to create that comb but also this is when the temperatures are perfect bees don't really like to draw comb when it's hot outside anything above 95 degrees and that comb becomes like butter and it just flops around and it becomes so hard for them to form it and shape it into what they want it to be because it's too hot it's too soft but also when the temps are up they're more concerned about keeping their brood alive so anything above 95 degrees and they have to cool their hive down and it takes a lot of work in order to do that of them fanning their wings to create a fan to help circulate the entire hive because if it's too hot the queen could die and the brood could die so that's number one priority if it's too hot they're really not going to want to draw some comb and the same thing applies to when the temps are cold anything below 70 degrees and that wax is pretty freaking hard so it's hard for them it's not very malleable it's not easy to be shaped so they're not really going to draw when it's cold either so again the temps have to be in range so something that i'm going to do today is i have this hive open and i'm going to take out some of the frames that are just blank and empty inside the hive and i'm going to rearrange some things to kind of trick them into building out the comb so bees when they're in their natural element they live in old rotted trees and they live in like a sphere or a cluster so in you when you go into your box you will notice of course that your bees are going to stay generally in one area and they don't really venture out to the outer edges of the box unless they absolutely need unless they absolutely need to like i said bees only build comb if they have to so if they need to have some place to store honey if the hive is expanding quickly and they need more areas for the queen to lay more eggs um then they're going to draw out more comb so one trick that i am doing is i am going to put in one of my empty frames right smack dab in the middle of the brood nest you can do this in the summertime and you don't really have to stress about it that much as long as the temperatures are going to be a generally warmer and no colder than 60 degrees at night maybe like upper 50s but just be careful with that summer is generally pretty warm so you don't have a whole lot to worry about when doing this um in terms of chilled brood so what happens is when you put a blank sheet right in the middle of their nest they're like what the heck is this and they start building it out because they don't like an empty sheet right in the middle okay so i have these arranged how i'm going to do them each one of these frames is filled with comb from front to back completely filled out so i'm going to put some empty frames one right here right here and right here so pretty much like you're checker boarding it so that they're pretty much forced to build out that comb because they don't like it when their brood nest is separated like this and also something that i like to do on the frames that i'm moving is i will spray them with a sugar water mixture um because this is going to make the bees come to there we go yeah there we go okay so this is gonna make the bees want to come and see the frame and clean it up because there's sugar water all over it so they will be forced to visit it and see what is going on so generally they're going to fill out the frames that are on the edges of the hive last so another tip that i like to do um so you'll see a frame it's filled out on one side and you can actually do this with any of the frames in your hive it doesn't have to be the ones on the outside but when you see they start to build the comb a little bit on this side but this side is still completely empty what you can do is you can literally just flip this and put the empty side so that it's touching where they already have comb built out and they will start building that side out they will always build out frames that are closest to the brood nest and they will expand the brood nest out and up also it's a good thing that i'm seeing there are a lot of young bees in here so that's going to be really good for them building out the comb in this hive also just another tip for any new beekeepers that are watching when you put frames in your hive make sure that once you have them all set in here that you make sure that you have a little bit of space here from the side on both sides of your hive but then all of the frames in between make sure they are touching at every single little spot because if not then what will happen is they'll start to build out honeycomb like they did here it's kind of hard for you to see but might be able to see a little better now but they started to build it out because i didn't have the frames close enough together and it's just something that it's helped it's easier to keep your your hive organized and clean when you do it this way that way everything's easier to get out and get to okay so i also have this honey super here that they haven't touched at all like they haven't even i mean they're they're on it now but they haven't even started drawing out any of the comb so i'm not gonna do it in this hive since i already kind of split them a little thin with the way i checkerboarded but what you can do is you can take one of these frames from one of your supers and you can actually put it right in the middle of two brood frames um now when you do this though you only want to do it for a couple days so that they you see that they started to build out the comb and then you should move it out so yep just throw one of these empty frames in between two brood frames leave it for like maybe two to three days and then come back if you forget about it then um they will actually start building out comb underneath it and you definitely don't want that but that's a little trick to get them to start building out the comb in your supers when they're just ignoring them um also i do want to mention though how i checkerboarded in the brood box do not ever do this in the this honey in the honey supers because the way they build out brood comb and the way they brew they build out honeycomb is completely different so brood comb they're only going to make them so deep because each cell has to be a certain size for the brood now with the honey though they will build it out as far as they possibly can so if you have built out built out frames on some of them and then you just throw in a empty frame in the middle of honey frames they're just going to build those already existing built out frames to like out to the empty frame they're not even going to touch that empty frame and then you're not going to be able to get that frame out so only do this in the brood box do not ever do this in the honey box i feel like i'm kind of like jumbling this up and not explaining it clearly but hopefully this makes sense to you okay so one last tip let's say that your bees have completely filled up your honey supers but there are still empty frames in your brood box say maybe you did a split and you had to put in some new frames in there and they just still haven't built them out and they're not building them out for some reason what you can do is you can literally force them to do it like i said bees won't do it unless they have to so they don't generally want to build comb because of the amount of energy that it takes so you can take away their honey supers and just leave them with what they have to have to figure it out and build out that comb and they will build out that comb because you're taking away the only source of food that they had in their hive so now they're forced to have to build out that comb because they need some place to store in all the new nectar that they're bringing in so i don't know that's a cool little tip that you can try okay so there was a lot of information packed into this video so i hope you're able to find something that you could take away to help you with your bees in your bee yard and i know guys that i said my next video was gonna be about how to fix wonky comb but the deep boxes that i ordered and all the frames have not came in yet the shipments delayed so as soon as as soon as those come in i will be posting about that so if you want to know how to fix wonky comb in your hives i promise this will be the next video so make sure you hit that subscribe button and hit the bell so that you're notified i'll see you guys in the next one

Channel: BeeFit Beekeeping

Views: 88,134

Keywords: beekeeping 101, summer build up, tips and tricks for beekeepers

Id: NUlO246TEcA

Length: 11min 7sec (667 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 11 2022