Come on bees move up!

[tbonekel]

Did an inspection today of my 3 hives. All three are double deeps and 1 super on top. The supers have been on since May 9th and there is no interest as of yet. There are several frames in the upper deep that are filled with nectar and capped honey and now I know why people don't like to use deeps as honey supers. Man one frame of honey is really heavy! It seems like when a bee hatches, they fill the cell with nectar and there is not many places for her to lay in that deep. They seem busy and happy and I didn't see any queen cells in the upper deep so I'm not too concerned. I just hope they decide to really like that super soon. How long does it take for your bees to move up?

[Jen]

tbone- ""It seems like when a bee hatches, they fill the cell with nectar and there is not many places for her to lay in that deep.""

   I have one of those as well. When I was inspecting this hive it occured to me that if I want the bees to move to the top, I need more bees. To get more bees, queen needs to lay more eggs. Could it be possible that your hive is getting nectar bound? Maybe move some of the nectar out, add more empty frames for the queen. Better yet, if you have some pulled frames where she can start laying pronto...   

In the upper deep, is there brood and larvae? can you find eggs?

[tbonekel]

Yes, Jen, there is lots of brood and larvae. I didn't see any eggs, but I didn't look really hard. The brood pattern is just fine. That's why I'm not too worried at this point. The more I think about it, the more I think I'm just being too impatient.

[Bsweet]

What size of "super" are you using ?
What type of foundation are you using in the deeps and supers ?
The reason I ask is.
If you use Medium supers and have a shallow, you can put both on the hive and remove a frame from each so that you can hang a filled deep frame down from the shalow into the medium, the filled frame may draw the bees up into the med. super Yes the bee space will be off FOR THAT ONE frame but once the bees move up you can put the correct frames back in.

Or if you use wax foundation in deeps and supers you can cut out the bottom section of a filled deep and rubber band it into a med. frame and install it into your super to draw the bees up'

Or if you have empty drawn deep frames just swap them out with filled ones as Jen said, if not run some through an extractor and put hem back in. Perhaps the queen will lay faster than they fill.  Jim

[pistolpete]

There was a pretty extensive discussion last year about how much space a queen needs to lay at her potential.  When you do the math based on 2000 eggs/day, it works out to 7 or 8 deep frames.    Granted that's edge to edge brood frames, but still, one 10 frame deep box is enough to have a full size brood nest.    Are you running a queen excluder?   If so, that's probably the issue.    bees like to store honey above the brood, so one possible manipulation is to reverse the deeps so that the brood is closer to the top.   

My bees are not reluctant to move up.   In fact they prefer to expand up rather than to the sides.  For that reason I leave the supers off until the bees are occupying all the frames in both deeps.   When they're like that they give a collective sigh of relief and move up into the spacious super right away.

[tbonekel]

Turns out I'm in too big of a hurry. My bees have decided to start drawing comb in the supers. I saw bridge comb and some drawn comb in two of the three hives. In the third one, comb is not drawn yet, but bees are all over the middle frame so I think it will happen soon. The bees were very busy and pretty friendly. Life is good! What will be interesting is to see how they handle two of the hives. In those I have just one frame of foundation and the rest are frames with just a starter strip. I'm sure they don't really like not have someplace ready to store there goodness, but I bet they can make it happen quick.

[Riverrat]

Bees will move up and start building comb when they think they need the room.  Sounds like if they moved up you may have a flow on