That’s a new one on me.
The bees bypassed the follower board and started building comb perpendicularly along its other face.
At least the cleanup was fairly easy. We’re in an oddly concentrated flow right now so they’ll replace the loss in a flash. I took out the follower and gave them a couple of wedge guide bars. Combs, I mean fingers crossed!
I recently made three splits off of my best colony using worker brood donated from three other colonies and field bees from a fourth.
The strongest of these splits decided to throw their first queen out along with three pounds of bees, rather than let her settle in. I hived them at the cost of twenty minutes of antics and a small tree branch. So now my best hive has a surprise fourth daughter.
I am currently out of short boxes, covers, and shade boards. I was also out of top bars but happened to have cut some more the day prior.
So what do I do? Whatever I can. Use what you’ve got, amirite? We had the first test of this (hopefully very) temporary hodgepodge setup from a strong thunderstorm last night. So far so good— they seemed unfazed this morning.
…Oh, and I have three queens shipping to me next week. Time to get building or make some decisions!
For any folks who are considering doing a Harbo assay in the future, this is what you are looking for, only in worker brood rather than drone brood.
Interestingly, this cut-out section was about 66 percent infested, yet the other section I cut out was perfectly clean. Yet another reminder that the mites aren’t equally distributed across the nest, so it’s very possible to miss them in a sample. Or over-sample, for that matter. It’s important to read the trends.