Tardis Supers

A beehive consists of a set of boxes.   The bees use the bottom boxes to put their brood in.  That's called the brood chamber.  They only need a couple of deep boxes or maybe three medium boxes to keep their brood in.

A beekeeper puts extra boxes on top for the bees to fill with honey.  Those boxes are called supers.   The very same type of box can be used as brood chamber or as a super.  The name refers to what the bees use it for. 

The Tardis is a horizontal hive body.   It's the same size as two boxes side by side.   We love that arrangement because when you take the lid off, it's easy to see inside and you can see all of the brood chamber at once without worrying about accidentally killing the queen when you're taking one brood box off the other.  

The Tardis still needs supers though so the bees don't feel crowded and so they can collect honey.    If it ever rains here again, we will have a lot of goldenrod and a significant nectar flow.   We have acres of goldenrod that should produce a lot of honey for the bees to overwinter on - if it rains. 

Once the frames in the brood chamber are 80% full, it's time to add supers.   This is what the Tardis looks like with its supers.   

The box on the bottom is all one box.  There are two boxes stacked on top, under the lid.  This gives the bees plenty of space for honey but the smaller boxes will be easier for us to lift.  Honey is heavy!

Here's a closer look at the center entrances.   The bees are loving the extra space to come in and out of.   There is usually a cloud of bees waiting in front.  This is a very busy hive. 

Notice they like the left one better.  It's the original one. 

Hive Repair - Tardis

Our Tardis hive is a horizontal hive body.    It looks like this.

The frames run the same direction as the bricks on top do.   21 frames fit into this box.   There is a center support on the bottom board and one on the inside of the cover.   The bottom support kept the frame that was in that position a bit high.

Turns out those supports were cramping the bees' style.   They weren't traveling freely through the whole box, just half of it.

And when we opened the hive at the last inspection, we found a lot of burr comb on top of that one side. 

What you see in the pic is only half of the comb.  The rest was attached to the lid.  They were unhappy when we took it away. 

Only honey comb was on the 'wrong side' of the hive.   No brood comb at all.   And the brood frames were getting smaller because they were getting filled with honey instead of brood.

It's a miracle we didn't find a swarm cell started up.   These bees were quickly getting honey bound.

So, we did some remodeling.    We popped the center bar out of the lid so they'd have easy access across the tops.

And Eric chiseled the bottom support waaaay down so they'd have bee space across the bottoms.  We also opened up another entrance right next to the old one that opens toward the 'wrong side'.

We also checkerboarded the 7 empty frames that they just wouldn't fill up by putting an empty after every two full frames.  That spread out the brood into the 'wrong side' and will hopefully get them moving through the whole box where they'll decide to expand the brood.

We love the horizontal hive bodies - so much easier to work than the langs.   Eric built this one and now we know how to tweak the design for the next ones.

Queen Bee

Queen getting ready to lay

This is the queen in our Tardis hive.   We call her Liz 10.  

[Whovians get it.]

Queen moving across capped honey comb

The Tardis is a horizontal hive body - as wide as two regular hive bodies side by side.   You take the lid off and can see the entire brood chamber without lifting one box off the other.  We LOVE horizontal hives and from now on, this is the way we're going to go. 

We're feeding this hive 1 quart of sugar syrup every other day.   They're sucking it dry.    I hope that if it ever starts raining here again, that when the goldenrod blooms, this hive will actually make us a few frames of honey.  We'll see.

Queen laying [in center of pic] , surrounded by attendants

We have had no problems with the Tardis hive.  The queen laid gangbusters from the beginning that that hive is constantly crowded at the entrance.   They much prefer the lower entrance, even though they can get out under the telescoping top lid.   I also opened a second lower entrance at the other end of the hive body but at the last inspection discovered a bumble bee in there robbing the honey, so I closed it off.   The bees obviously weren't guarding it. 

Thanks to Lily for the pics.   She does the camera thing while Eric and I are working the hives.  I point and tell her what to shoot and she shoots.  It makes things much easier for us.