# Will bees move nectar from a separate box?



## Margles (Jul 11, 2016)

Hello all,

I know bees will take honey out of nearby comb and move it to their hive, but will they move nectar?

I have Warre hives. Last year I bought a package of bees, later caught a swarm of my own bees, and ended up with two small colonies. Both died over the winter.

This year I bought a nice healthy 5-frame nuc that came in Langstroth configuration. I made the transfer by cutting a hole in a piece of plywood and putting the nuc on top of my Warre hive after making sure the queen was down below the nuc and separated from it by a queen excluder. I calculated that the last of any eggs laid in the nuc would have hatched and the young bees able to fly three weeks from when I excluded the queen.

That day was today. There was NO brood, but unfortunately, all frames were FULL of nectar (and lots of drones, who couldn't fit through the queen excluder, apparently). I removed the plywood and excluder, set the nuc on some blocks right next to the hive and watched as bees began to move over to the hive, but now I'm wondering if they will move all that beautiful nectar they've already gathered. I have friends with Langstroths who probably would be happy to get it all, but I'd really rather my own bees enjoy the fruits of their labor.

Thank you for being out there and willing to help.

M.


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## c-bees (Jun 1, 2017)

They'll definitely rob out your frames for you, but probably not if you have any nectar flow still on. During a flow, you can, for example, turn a foundationless frame the wrong way and drop a whole slab of comb honey on the ground in front of your hive, and they will ignore it for days until you finally scrape it up and put in the freezer.....ask me how I know 

But yeah, you can freeze it until a dearth and set it out to get robbed, but you'd probably feed other bees, so you can put your plywood and QE back on and put the box back on during a dearth and they could rob it out through the QE......but they might just consider it their winter stores and leave it, you never know.........


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