Adding Boxes to the Hives

I'm leaving for a week and it's the peak of the tulip poplar flow in Atlanta, so I posted on Beemaster to find out if I could leave empty supers on the hives even if the boxes below were not built out enough. The answer was to leave each hive with room to store honey in an extra box.

I checked the hives as I added boxes. In the small office parking lot swarm, the queen is laying. Here is her new brood. I was thrilled since I wasn't totally sure I had a good queen in this hive.


In one of the yard hives (I HAVE to name these hives - otherwise I'll have to resort to 1, 2, 3, etc. and that's no fun) the bees were building comb on top of the frames. I scraped off the burr comb and added a box. I turned to put the top back on the hive and there was Her Majesty, wandering around on the top! Horrors! I put her back as quickly as I could.


I added an 8 frame medium to this 10 frame hive and put a painted 2X4 to cover the exposed frames in the bottom box.

When I left town each hive had a yellow newly painted box on top. I didn't check the hive where the queen was released because I didn't want to disturb her.