🐝 Turn Leftover Capped Stores Into Drawn Comb - Smart Spring Manipulation

In this video, I'm gonna show you how to use your leftover frames of capped stores, and I'm gonna show you how to turn them into drawn comb. So that might sound like a really, really easy thing to do. You take your frames of capped stores, you let the bees work those stores, and then you turn that actual frame into some drawn comb. I'm not gonna show you how to do that though, 'cause that's quite self-explanatory, and I think a lot of people will find themselves in this situation, especially this year as well, is that you'll end up with quite a lot of leftover additional frames full of capped stores. So what I'm going to show you in this video is how you can convert those frames of capped stores into new frames of drawn comb by adding foundation above the capped stores, bruising the combs, putting it in between brood, letting the bees work those frames of capped stores, moving it upstairs, and turning it into drawn comb. Now there's a few things you need to be careful with here. If you've treated your colonies with Apivar, or if you've fed your colonies a significant amount of sugar syrup, Then what you don't want to do is you don't want to do this manipulation and put drawn comb above them, because all you're going to be doing is moving up that contaminated stores into the box above. However, if you do it just with wax foundation, what the bees will do is they will use the energy that's stored within those frames of capped stores, they'll move that upstairs, and they'll use that energy to draw out the wax foundation and turn it into drawn comb. It's a really easy, simple manipulation, And it's a good way of getting rid of extra frames of stores without having to go through the process of actually going and storing them throughout the summer and then feeding them back to bees. So as always, it'll make a lot more sense when I show you it. I'll get my bee suit on, I'll go and show you exactly how to do it. So these are the kind of frames that I'm talking about. Really, really heavy, lots of stores in them. Actually looks there like you've got a little bit of granulation in the stores as well. What are you gonna do with these frames? I'm gonna turn them into drawn comb, and I'm gonna get the bees to use this energy to draw out some wax foundation. So what you need to do, identify which combs you wanna do this with, and then what you need to do is take your hive tool and you need to bruise the surface as much as you possibly can. Bruising the surface is really easy. Just take your hive tool and you just wanna break the wax cappings. You don't need to go crazy. You just wanna make sure that it's exposing that liquid honey underneath. And then the bees, they really don't like that when you do that, and they feel the urge to go in there and clean it up straight away. Once you've bruised it up, it'll look something like this, and you can see the bees immediately go onto it and try and work it. So make sure you bruise it on both sides, and then what we're going to do is we're going to take that bruised comb and we're going to place it in between 2 frames of brood. Now, as I said, you can do this with numerous combs. I would go up to a maximum of, say, 2 at this point of the year, but make sure that you're only putting one in between 2 frames of brood. Don't have brood, comb, comb, brood. You want to make sure that each capped stores frame that you've bruised has a brood frame either side of it. So I've marked the frame S for stores, and I'm going to place that directly into the middle of the colony now, in between 2 frames of brood. So what I suggest at this point is, if you're doing this process, is that you double brood your colonies up. I don't like doing this and putting the queen excluder on and then doing it with the supers because you do risk contamination in that. So I'm going to run this colony here on a double brood configuration. And then what you want to do is you want to take your next brood box, place it directly on the top, and you want to make sure that all of that brood box has got frames that's got only foundation in it. So here's my brood box here, completely new frames, only with foundation in. You can see there, bees are already on that trying to get inside that. You can see there, we've just got foundation, nothing's been drawn out yet. We're going to take this box and we're going to put it directly onto that colony where we've bruised the capped stores. So I'm taking the box, double brood configuration, and I'm just gonna put that directly on top. So what's gonna happen now is the bees are gonna react to the bruising of those stores and they're gonna wanna make space back for the queen to lay brood in between those 2 brood frames. And what bees naturally do is they move stuff upwards. But in this instance, when you move stuff upwards into foundation like this, they've got nowhere to store it. So they're gonna use the energy that they're moving upwards, turn it into drawn comb. It's a really, really handy way of making sure that your bees are using up all of the excesses of winter and turning it into a really useful product for you. There is a big caveat that I'm going to put in here though. Your bees are at risk of starving if you do this, so don't do it on all of the combs. Don't think, I've got 4 combs in there and I'm going to do all 4 combs at once, because if your bees react to it well and they bring it all upstairs and they draw out all of that foundation, And then you get a real cold snap, you can leave the bees a little bit short. So I would just do it kind of gradually, incrementally throughout the early spring, and if you time it right, you should end up with a very limited amount of stores in the brood nest and a nice big new box full of drawn combs. Give it a couple of weeks, I'll do another video, premium channel members, and then I'll stitch all this together at the end. I'm confident though, when we come back, that frame that had been marked S, that will be not only empty but but laid up with either eggs or brood, and then we'll start to see some real big improvements in terms of wax drawing up in this second brood box. So it's been 7 days now since we put that frame of capped stores directly in the middle of that brood nest. Big strong brood nest here. Let's see what the bees have made of that in 7 days. So here's the bees. They've still not expanded up into that top box, started to draw it out just a tiny little bit. Here's the frame that you can see marked with an S. Let's get that frame out now, see if it's still capped or see if the bees have turned it into something else. So there we go. You can see this is the frame that was marked S, and have a look at it. There is no more capped stores on it whatsoever. The bees have cleared out all of those capped stores. You can see up here we've got a little bit of fresh nectar. That's new nectar that's been coming in. And then you look into the middle. It is always impossible to show this on camera. But that queen has fully laid that up with eggs and larvae. Brood in most stages, not got any capped worker brood in there, but I've got eggs, I've got larvae. All of that big frame of capped stores, they've converted that energy into managing the hive. I reckon we'll find a little bit of drawn comb up the top as well. But as you can see here, all of those capped stores are gone. And we did that by bruising the stores, putting it back into the middle of the brood nest one frame at a time. And they have turned that into brood. So then this is the top box here. Still not a huge amount of action there, but you can see that the bees have made a start of drawing out some of those frames. I'll pull a couple out now and show you just how well they're getting on. They've actually done really well. There's about 3 or 4 frames that look like this. They're directly above where that capped stores frame was. So bees doing what they do best, which is moving honey, moving energy upwards. They've converted that capped frame of stores into drawn comb, but on a completely different frame. But this is a really good way to make sure you exhaust all of those capped stores, use the resources for something good, and give you a real valuable commodity at the same time. So what you can do now is you can just continue that process again and again. If you've got another 4 frames in there, go in, bruise up another one of those capped store frames, put it back in the middle of the brood, keep on recycling it, and they will just bring that upstairs, turn it into wax. But just make sure, as I said, if it's contaminated by Apivar or any varroa treatment or it's sugar syrup, make sure they're not storing that upstairs. You want to leave anything like that down in the brood nest, and they will get around to using it eventually. If you want to see a video on how to requeen a beehive in under 5 minutes, check out this video here for a really simple step-by-step process.