Hive Management

Early Spring

Early brood inspections can be made from the top, as in a standard hive body, there being no heavy supers to deal with.

When opening the hive from the side for the first time, after winter, scrape off the propolis and apply fresh petroleum jelly to the mating faces

If the bees have been over-wintered in a British National Drawhive, then at the first inspection, the propolis deposit along the edges of the inner chamber, by the ends of the frames, should be scraped off, before trying to slide open the box. This propolis will have set very hard in the months since the slide was last operated and the Drawhive may be difficult to open at first, if this isn’t removed. The hive will then open easily for the rest of the season.

Ensure there is enough food, the queen has room to lay and the hive does not become congested as the population rises.

Supers with drawn comb can be put on, as soon as the bee population grows with warmer weather, but if adding foundation, wait until there is a honey flow on or feed. It can go wavy, or get chewed if the bees can’t draw it out.

Swarm Control

As the colony expands, make sure the brood nest is not clogged with honey, restricting the queen. It may be necessary to remove one or two food combs, from the outside, and replace with empty combs next to the brood. Do not remove pollen.

If queen cells are found, then providing they are unsealed, giving the extra room and cutting out the cells will sometimes make the bees give up on swarming.

Removed combs can be stored for later use, given to another colony, or placed above supers and crown board in a spare body. If the cappings are scraped, the bees should take the honey down.

Sooner or later, you will wish to carry out some form of manipulation to prevent loss of a a swarm. All the usual methods which don’t require the hive to be moved can be used, such as the demaree, artificial swarm, or the removal of the queen to a nucleus. These methods are covered in many places, so I won’t repeat them here. A good web site is the one maintained by Dave Cushman.

The Drawhive is particularly suited to methods involving a second top brood chamber, as no dismantling is needed to get at the bottom one. For this reason, the two queen system is a practical and potentially rewarding plan.

I will describe the manipulations required to make an artificial swarm, from a Drawhive. The practicalities can then be easily modified for other methods.

Assuming you want the queen to stay on site, you need the usual spare brood box, plus another container to take the frame with the queen on it, such as a nucleus box. Having put the frame with the queen safely to one side, arrange the frames between the Drawhive and spare brood box, as required, return the queen to the Drawhive and make up with extra frames. This is just the same as normal practice except that you don't dismantle the hive and switch brood boxes.

If the queen can't be found, she could have been on the excluder, so close up and leave a while for her to move back on the frames. You could remove any food combs and separate the remaining frames into pairs. Then open up with the minimum smoke. If she still can’t be found, but they haven't swarmed, then a shook swarm can be made with a Tanarov board.

The frames should be placed, temporarily, in a spare body, after clearing the bees, to make sure the queen is shaken off with the rest. Bees are brushed from any frame with a queen cell you wish to keep.

The frames are then returned, the hive closed and the bees left to sort themselves out. When the cluster of mostly younger bees, with the queen, is well formed (usually about an hour ), they can be hived elsewhere in the same apiary, as they behave like a natural swarm. Obviously, in this case, the queen must be moved.