Guilfordbeekeepers.org

I decided at the beginning of my beekeeping adventure to run all mediums. At the time, I thought the advantage of being able to move frames around wherever I wanted was going to be a great advantage. What I've discovered is that my hive inspections and swarm prevention attempts have suffered because I have more boxes and more frames to take apart and look at...

So I'm changing my approach next year, and I'm going to switch to single brood chamber management using deeps, with all my mediums dedicated as honey supers only. That means I have to figure out a good way to get 20+ deeps and 200+ frames built and drawn out next spring.

I'm looking for advice on the best way to do this, timing, etc. in order to get them drawn and limiting swarming at the same time. Should I put them on in Jan/Feb, as I've witnessed my colonies drawing wax and filling up my feeding shims the past couple of years during this time? Should I feed to encourage wax-building? If I wait until early April right when the nectar flow starts to get them drawn out, I will have likely missed the opportunity to use this extra work and space as a swarm prevention measure...

I have been using captured swarms this season to get comb drawn. I have kept feeders on most of my swarms and have been giving them frames & foundation to draw after they have drawn 2 medium boxes to live in. I remove a frame when the majority of the frame is drawn deep enough for a queen to lay in. My thinking is that if I put these on as a first honey super in late February/early March, it avoids Imirie's warning that frames and foundation are not viewed as useable space by the bees. When a flow starts, the bees can finish drawing the comb and it will take far less nectar to get this done. My next challenge with these is to get bees to remove the sugar water in them without destroying the delicate wax so that they will be ready for next spring.

I haven't tried to start a regular hive drawing comb in a big way, but it might be possible. I would think you would need to crowd a hive to some degree and set it up initially with lots of nurse bees and capped brood. Give it your super to get drawn and put a feeder on top. Warm weather-young bees-need for space-plenty of food are triggers for bees to draw wax (pretty much the formula to trigger swarming as well).

I'm not sure your mediums had anything to do with your swarm issues this year. I tried a fair amount of brood box reversals (Imirie). I added a super on top of strong hives and used the open drawn comb in it to alternate frames with the honey/feed super that had been on top (Walt Wright-checkerboarding). I even added another super of open, drawn comb on some after that. My failing was not going into the hives during the cool, wet days of March to deal with the massive build up of bees in the mild days of February.

I'd like to hear from others what they do to get comb drawn.