The Books Told Me it Would Happen

We did a hive inspection today, having put it off due to heat and scheduling on the weekend. It was still too hot today - 27 degrees is weather more appropriate for July - but I was fairly certain they would be out of sugar syrup, and I needed to know if they were running out of room.

The original bars where they had built comb and reared brood were already being used again. The bees in the hive have visibly increased in numbers, and these combs already had new larva in them, which meant the workers had cleaned and prepped the cells after their first inhabitants had emerged. The wax of the used cells will continue to darken with use, as there is some debris left behind by the process.

 

You can see a fairly distinct line here, dividing original comb from the new extension - the new wax is very pale.

Unfortunately, as sometimes happens when you allow bees to build their comb without a structured guide as in other hive types, they build with a bit of a curve, or sometimes ignore the dimensions altogether. On a few occasions, I've gently bent curving ends back towards the centre of the top bar, but today they had built across two bars, and coaxing it apart did some damage.

 

 

This is built on one bar , forcing the larger piece out of line and causing crossover and a weak connection to the bar itself. This would only continue to make working in the hive more difficult as the season progressed. I gently removed the smaller piece, which they were building to fill a gap, and which had no contents. The bees will salvage the wax and use it to build new comb.

 

Here's where it went wrong - I gently tried to move the larger comb back in line with the bar, but my intrusion had already done some damage, and the heat was making the wax soft. We returned the bar to the hive, but the comb slid off to land on the floor of the hive.

 

 

Now we just have to keep our fingers crossed that the comb didn't squash the queen, step back and let the colony repair the damage. Most of the literature I've read on the subject assures you that sooner or later you're going to do some unintentional damage, and that the bees will fix what needs to be fixed  - I still feel pretty bad about it though.