DON'T MAKE THIS BIG BEEKEEPING MISTAKE! Fixing Burr Comb / Cross Comb In A Beehive
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- Опубликовано: 16 авг 2020
- I've done this more times than I would like to admit. I don't have enough frames on hand and tell myself "I'll go get more later." Then I forget and a week later I open the beehive and see a box full of burr comb. Burr comb is when bees fill up a space that's larger than the usual 3/8" bee space we leave in between frames. The result is honeycomb that is in different directions and connecting to other pieces of comb.
It's fascinating to see what the bees do when given a big empty space, but not fun for the beekeeper to fix. You have to fix it b/c you can't inspect the hive otherwise. Without frames in the box, the bees connect the comb to the lid and/or to the frames that the comb is sitting on.
Here's how I tackle this.
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It’s amazing how thick some of the combs are!
It is! Usually the frames with honey are super wide. I used to work for a farm that made their own frames. They built them extra wide so they put just 7 frames in a 10 frame box. It saved them a lot of time harvesting honey. Instead of 10 narrow frames to harvest, they would harvest 7 wide frames of honey.
I just love your videos. I've been keeping for 13 years and just fixed this today. Mine was the brood chamber extending down into the box below.
Wow what a mess.
thanks for sharing that with us! very helpful! I have made some ooopsies like this while working the bees in the summer. the heat can get to us!
Haha yes! The heat definitely makes me a little bit lazier. It's also a downside to having bees on other people's property. I had no extra frames so I was supposed to go back and it's. 30-45 min drive
thank you, yes it is informative, somewhat to my situation, but needed to see more
Very helpful. Thank you!
You're welcome!
Wow you did such a great job with all that honey comb ❤
I believe it is required to put boxes from on the left and right so that empty spaces can be used. In the middle frames inserted with wax, one has wax another doesn't. Otherwise they will make a mess like this. I wonder if theye selling boxes for this purpose.
A bee escape put between that problem box and the one below a day before the surgery would have cleared most of the bees from the problem box.
It would have! This hive was on a client's property over an hour from my house and there are no beekeeping supply places in our state, so it would have been at least a week or two before I would have been able to do that. 3 day shipping does not exist for the big island, BUT a great idea if you have a bee escape on hand.
I just wanna say thanks, this is going to help me😊😅
wonderful
япона улей, тобишь большой японский улей. large japanese beehive. Japanese people would not call it mistake. They have smaller behives.
Take the top box off so your only running honey on the ground or in a tub, not back into your hive.
Cool video
@Beekeeping Made Simple how do you handle it if there is brood in the burr comb??? Do you give it back on empty frames even if it's not straight?
I am wondering the same thing.
If there's brood on the burr comb, I rubberband it to an empty frame like the honey. Sometimes the brood gets harmed and I'm assuming the bees remove the brood, fix it and let the queen lay new eggs in the cells. I always try to salvage the brood and put it back into the hive as close to the way it was as possible. to be honest, I have no idea if the bees accept the brood if it's at an angle or a little messed up. I don't mark the frames I rubberbanded and often the bees remove the rubberbands the next time I check on them. We have a lot of hives!
@@BeekeepingMadeSimple Thank you for your response and for all the great advice.
Hello my friend, do you have a favorite place to buy your honey jars? And does it make a different to have plastic or glass jars for honey? Thanks
Yes! I buy the hex jars (they're hexagon shaped). I get them from a distributor of glass here on the island. They are called Sustainable Island Products. I found out about them from a friend who sold mead. I recommend asking around to other people who sell food in glass containers like people who sell jam to find a local distributor in your area. I don't order online because shipping to Hawaii doubles the cost of the jars.
I also cannot recommend enough the hexagon shaped jars. They hold up when shipped much better than the round jars and pack very nicely together.
As for glass versus plastic, I prefer the glass. I think it makes it easier for the buyer to heat the honey if it crystallizes. You can tell people that it's not necessary to heat honey and that they could be getting rid of the health benefits in honey, but people still do it, so I figure it's best to put it in a heat safe container. Plastic is also porous, so, technically, honey can crystallize faster in plastic. For me, I sell a lot of comb honey in a jar with liquid honey. These can't be sold crystallized or people won't be able to get to the comb inside, so they're put in a hot box when they crystallize. I don't want to put plastic jars in a hot box.
@@BeekeepingMadeSimple thx so much. Yes, me too. I love the hexagon glass jars with gold lids. This fir the info.
Oh boy, what a mess! The one thing I keep reminding new beekeepers is if they catch a new swarm, or add a package of bees, in the beginning, that hive needs to be checked every 5 days until it's going in the right direction. Otherwise you get this.
In this situation, I didn't have enough frames to fill up the entire box. I meant to go get more after I was done checking the hive next to it, but completely forgot and a week later opened the hive to find this mess. I'm hoping my forgetfulness is temporary and mostly due to having a baby waking me up all night long. Fingers crossed I become a functioning human being again one day!
@@BeekeepingMadeSimple being non-functional can be pretty sweet.
@@BeekeepingMadeSimple I've done this without sleep deprivation from baby raising.
I had no excuse. Yours is very valid lol
This was a weeks worth of honey! Amazing.
Do you know what kind of flowers your bees visit? My honey is very dark compared to yours. Yours looks very nice.
Hi, I need help. I have inspected my hive today and discovered that my bees have made comb in the roof space above the brood box and the super. The comb is stuck to the crown board. The comb contains drone larvae and also queen cups. Please can you give me advise on what I should do now? I removed the queen excluder last year, and obviously the Queen has laid at the top of the hive. Help!!! Thank you in advance.
If I were you, I'd smoke the comb to get as many bees off of it as possible and then cut off the comb and put it in the freezer to kill the larvae. You're not doing any harm to the hive by killing drone comb. If the bees are going to swarm, then they probably have queen cells on other frames in the hive as well. If they don't, then they'll make a queen from one of the eggs in the hive. When you turn a queen cell upside down, that baby queen is not considered viable anymore so I wouldn't feel bad cutting them out. you most likely harmed her when you took the lid off.
The problem isn't that the queen excluder was taken off, though. You really can't have empty space in your hive that is more than 3/8" or the bees will build comb in there. If your queen excluder was still on the hive, the bees would have filled that comb with honey and that's no better, so just make sure you don't have empty space in the hive and make sure you're adding empty honey supers before the hive gets too crowded. Not just to prevent crazy comb building but also to prevent swarming which is possibly what your bees are trying to do if you're seeing queen cells. Hopefully, you can still add some empty frames to your brood boxes and an empty super on top and you'll stop them from swarming before its too late.
What a mess. Did the bees survive all that honey dripping on them?
ok I'm new and have foundationLESS(I know a mistake). Anyway I'm wondering why your bees are not eating you alive. I did similar with more "joy" than I could stand
I don't use foundation either! I prefer not to use foundation in my brood boxes and honey supers. The bees temper depends on a few things. Some of it is genetics, some is the time of year, some is your presence and whether they view you as a threat, and a lot is their health. Bees that are not happy and healthy can be more aggressive.
@@BeekeepingMadeSimple This beehive recently died out or swarmed. They disappeared over a few weeks. Post-mortem turned up queen cells. My other problem with foundationless was cross-combing which made working the hive almost impossible. I once tried to correct the comb problem by judicious cutting(the girls did not like that) and when I attempted to remove an overbuilt frame, comb and honey fell out and once again the girls were not happy.
What do you do if you have a small colony in just one deep box or nuc, and you've got brood in all that cross comb? I wouldn't have thought you could just throw that in a container.
If your brood is across multiple frames, you should cut it out, making sure not to bend the comb and put it in rubberbands the same way I did with the honey. Try to keep it attached to one of the frames, if possible, and just cut it from the other frames it's connected to. It is not common for something like this to happen in the brood. You would either have to go a long time without checking the brood for so much brood comb to be built and filled in by the queen. If there is a big nectar flow going on, a honey super can get filled up in weeks. There is only one queen walking around laying eggs. She can't fill in frames as quickly.
Could you have cut this whole box out with a wire like the Japanese do with blocks and taken the whole box away to ? I'm hoping to never make this mistake but I'm just curious if that would have worked?
Possibly! It would definitely be a two person operation and you'd still have to cut it all apart, but if you wanted to cut it out away from the hive for some reason, that is a good idea to try. You would definitely need to heavily smoke the box to get the bees out first, but good thinking!
@@BeekeepingMadeSimple Thanks for your reply :)
I personally know "EXACTLY" what this is like as I have done the same silly thing and forgotten to put frames into a box. I had in only 4 frames and all that free flow comb, just as fat, just as messy. An interesting experience but I wont make that mistake, hopefully again.
LOL I love that you said "hopefully" because that is so true. I'd like to think I won't make that mistake again, but my brain isn't getting any younger :p
I opened up one of my one and a half brood hives last night (first time in a long while!), to discover not only was a frame missing from the shallow box, but there were NO frames in the brood box! Don't know how on earth that happened. So I have a brood box full of burr comb which is loaded with honey and (presumably) brood.I ended up having to close the hive back up. How do I resolve this without losing the brood that are in there? I have plenty of spare brood boxes and empty frames. I'd appreciate your advice.
you can cut the brood comb out the same as the comb with honey in it and put it in empty frames with a rubberband holding it in. I would use a sharp knife to make sure you don't squish too much of the comb and try to put the comb back into the box roughly the same order it was before you removed it. Also be really careful to not squish the queen. OR, you can just leave them bee and wait until fall when the queen stops laying and pull it all out. That's definitely the lazy approach but is the way some beekeepers would do it.
@@BeekeepingMadeSimple thank you so much for your reply which I've only just seen. I haven't attempted anything yet - will let you know how it goes when I do!
@@BeekeepingMadeSimple Thank you for sharing your knowledge and experience with the rest of us. I am acquiring as much information as I can on the subject because I will have to fix my bees creative approach to building comb. I inspected my first hive yesterday and found they had crossed combed 7 of 10 frames. Not sure if there's brood as it is fall now but I will find out in a week. Thanks again :)
What time of year did this take place?
March, Kiawe blooming season.
OMG!
Not gonna lie I did this now I’m on this video
I think you missed to put that frames intentionally !
Hah I wish. Unfortunately, I am that absent-minded sometimes :)
Late.
it is very hard to hear you explain what you are doing.
The bees swarm my hands and sting me like crazy ..I've got sum leather Tig welding gloves to try ..
Interesting... Do you know why they're so aggressive? Genetics? Not enough nectar? Viruses?