# Results of Opening the Sides of the Broodnest



## MattDavey (Dec 16, 2011)

Please use the following notation:

*N* = A new undrawn empty frame with no more than 1/2 a sheet of foundation.
*D* = A drawn comb with some honey, nectar or pollen.
*B* = A frame with SOME brood on it.

So let's look at an example:
I have made the frames that I expect the bees to draw out in Bold.

Example of 2 Deep boxes. New frames have half a sheet of wax foundation.

BEFORE
(Bees emptied out the 2 drawn frames moved up to the top box previously):

NNNNDDNNNN
DDBBBBBBDD


AFTER MANIPULATION 
(Expecting the bees to work on at least 4 new frames):

NND*N*DD*N*DNN
D*N*BBBBBB*N*D


RESULT AFTER 2 WEEKS 
(Brood on bottom of frames in the top box, bees expanded in top more than expected): 

NDDBBBBDDN
DDBBBBBBDD


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## Eduardo Gomes (Nov 10, 2014)

MattDavey said:


> RESULT AFTER 2 WEEKS
> (Brood on bottom of frames in the top box, bees expanded in top more than expected):
> 
> NDDBBBBDDN
> DDBBBBBBDD


Thank you Matt. Have you ever got this configuration after 2 weeks?

NDDBBBBDDN
D*B*BBBBBB*B*D


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## MattDavey (Dec 16, 2011)

The Broodnest probably wasn't as wide as the example. But Yes, the queen likes laying eggs in brand new comb. So she may go outward or up, or lay in all 4 new combs.


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## enjambres (Jun 30, 2013)

Coming out of last winter I started this with only three brood combs in the center of one box. (My boxes are artificially reduced in interior space during the winter so they were only 5 to 7 frames accross to start with.) 

It worked quite well for me in two out of three hives. Neither of those two made any swarm preps at all, beyond a steady production of (mostly) dry queen cups. Since it was my first time encountering them, they made me anxious but I soon learned I could safely just let them be as the bees made them and tore them pretty regularly.

I found I needed less than two weeks, once as few as five days, between adding combs on the side of the brood nest to keep the process going smoothly with a steady introduction of a fresh "hole" on the edge ofthe brood area. 

One colony went from five or six drawn frames at the start to forty deeps by the end of the summer. We had an exceptional honey year locally last year, but that's still a lot of fresh comb.

The only down side was that I found it to be a lot of work and pretty intrusive into the hives. I would guess that my perception of that is colored, in no small part, by my anxiety about whether it would work and my general inexperience with doing it. This year with confidence that it does work and much more experience doing it, I think it will seem less demanding. The girls may not like it any more, though.

I live in an unreliable northern climate and we can have spates of very cold weather during this period. (But did not have have that happen last year, after a very late start to Spring.) I plan on keeping my winter insulation panels on my hives to buffer any freezes that occurr after I've started opening the sides. 

Enj.


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## Mike Gillmore (Feb 25, 2006)

enjambres said:


> It worked quite well for me in two out of three hives.
> 
> I found I needed less than two weeks, once as few as five days, between adding combs on the side of the brood nest to keep the process going smoothly with a steady introduction of a fresh "hole" on the edge of the brood area.
> 
> Enj.


That sounds great. What time of year did you start adding frames and see wax being drawn?


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## IsedHooah (Jan 13, 2015)

Ejn. you are a little more north than I am, but what do you say is a good guide as far as daytime/nighttime temps go when you start this process? I have never tried anything outside of plain checker boarding, but this seems to place a method to the madness so to speak.


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## wirenut501 (Apr 29, 2013)

Enjambres
Every two weeks when you added two new frames what did you do with the two frames that had pollen or nectar or maybe honey in them.


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## Eduardo Gomes (Nov 10, 2014)

enjambres said:


> It worked quite well for me in two out of three hives. Neither of those two made any swarm preps at all, beyond a steady production of (mostly) dry queen cups. Since it was my first time encountering them, they made me anxious but I soon learned I could safely just let them be as the bees made them and tore them pretty regularly.


Enjambres
What happened to your 3rd hive where the technique did not work? Swarmed? What is the reason, if you know it, for this outcome?

This year you say this technique you will give less work. Because you will rely more and not inspected as often swarming signs? Or the reason is different?


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## Robbin (May 26, 2013)

Hi Matt,
I'm going to start next week as I can tell my hives are building. I've got a question, is it more effective to force the HOLE, or if I've got empty comb, use that? You loss the forced wax building, but have a bunch of new room to raise brood. I don't intend to continue to grow a lot of hives, 14 is about all I want, so I don't see an advantage to growing a lot of new comb.
Thanks,


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## enjambres (Jun 30, 2013)

@Mike Gilmore & IsedHoohah:

I started around the middle of April, which I think was late-ish. But last year the winter hung on and on and I was getting spooked that I might be missing a critical signal. (Reading Walt Wright's description of his take on the timing of storm preps and waiting and waiting for the expected floral cues to appear caused my doubts. I am, BTW, a professional horticulturist so I knew for certain that my 2014 growing season was delayed as I have lived and gardened on this farm for more than a quarter century.) 

Last year's other unusual factor was that after being late starting by about 10-14 days, Spring proceeded steadily with no backsliding temperature-wise. Generally we have a vexing combination of warm and then a return to frigid. For example, we can't safely plant out tomatoes until the last week of May, because of frost risk. (Your typical local tomato-planting time will help you compare my climate to yours.) By early summer things were back on track so the early part of the growing season, and flowering sequence (factors I think affect the bees a good deal) had been artificially compresed in the shortened Spring of 2014. I continued opening the brood nest clear through to the beginning of June - so eight or nine long weeks of work. (In the previous year, 2013, the year my three colonies arrived here as swarms themselves, they came between May 25 and June 17, so those were the known dates of very local swarming)

@Wirenut:

Well, my situation is a little peculiar because of my winter hive configurations. I winter with fewer frames than normal in my 10-frame equipment (last year 5 to 6, and this winter 7 or 8). In the space that is left over I have wooden follower boards and foam insulation panels _inside the hive._ This is obviously not part of Matt's technique, but what I did initially was remove one of the partially drawn frames from the outer edge entirely when I installed the first Opening The Side Of The Brood Nest (OTSOTBN) frame. (The frame like all of they early ones was, BTW, simply an empy deep w/ a starter strip nailed to the groove on top. Eventually I ran out of these and the latest ones were simply full sheets of foundation with the lower corners whacked-off diagonally,) I did one side at a time, not both, at least at first. After the first round I then removed one of the layers of foam outboard of the follower boards and slid the follower board, and the outermost honey/pollen frame outwards enough to make room for the next OTSOTBN. frame. Eventually I moved a couple of frames of brood and some honey/pollen frames on either side of them up to the next box, and waited for the situation to stabilize and then started performing OTSOTBN on that level, too. When all of these two boxes were filled with this pattern, so I started a third, and so on. What made it more complicated was that I felt that every addition or move upward needed some decision-making about whether it was the right time for each change. Matt's description makes it sound very cut and dried, and on a schedule. In practice I found it required a lot of on-the-spot evaluation. This is what I think will be easier for me this year as I was so uncertain about the process last year that I tended to worry I was making a fatal error. (And it was complicated because of my weird winter arrangements - because all the boxes must stay the same width top to bottom of the stack which is an added issue. Sometimes I just moved a partially drawn-out, but empty, comb up or down on the outside just to keep the boxes, with their follower boards and foam panels vertically balanced. In a less complicated system this would not arise.)

Sometimes I just moved a frame that didn't fit with Matt's plan out of the hive temporarily, or parked it above. (Obviously not a frame with brood!)

@Eduardo:

Well, the fate of my third hive, my largest one though in fact not terribly big, highlights the other issue. While I was doing all of this brood nest opening I was also anxiously checking for evidence of swarm preps. I wasn't very clear, or experienced enough (and probably am _still _not experienced enough) at judging the brood patterns and cell usage pattern of the individual frames for signs of swarm prep, so I had to rely on watching for the presence of any swarm cells. This is an extra challenge with this system if you are flat-out determined not to have lose any queens to swarms, as I was last year. So in addition to making on-the-fly judgements about whether to add another OTSOTBN frame, and where, I was hunting for swarm cells. Queen _cups_ worried the heck out of me. And then, finally, I saw a couple of queen cups with royal jelly, and maybe what might turn into an actual swarm cell, or two. I asked for advice here and got the usual mix of help and confusion inherent in trying to valid judgements about hives the posters can't see. I decided to go back in and see the next day - and impulsively performed a split (my first!). But my inexperience showed because I got the assortment among the two boxes of frames with eggs/capped brood wrong, and then my incompetence came into play when it became clear that I had somehow managed to screw it up even more by getting the queen in the wrong box. I wrote about this in my posts about my Muddle-Headed Split. In the end I wound up redividing the messed-up split. More embarassing drama ensued that I haven't chronicled, after that. But in the end, my bees made it all come out right: with my original Queen Buttercup set up housekeeping in a new hive and her daughter, Queen Anthemis, got cooked up, mated and taking over the old colony. Both were still with me day before yesterday, before we descended back into depths of another round of Arctic air (minus 17 F this morning!) Those two hives are now my (relatively) smallest being just 14 deep frames plus 14 medium frames apiece as they went into winter, snug in their insulated hives. That compares to the two which never made swarm preps and grew into huge colonies by the end of he summer, which are wintering in either 32 deeps or 16 deeps plus 32 mediums. Those two are undoubtedly already planning on traveling this Spring. We'll see about that! 

I plan to deploy all anti-swarm techniques: I will be removing any gross amount of uneeded honey left after winter to reduce the size of the stack, then perform a partial Walt Wright style checkerboarding if the bee have eaten enough combs empty to do that,_ plus _Matt Davey's OTSOTBN frames as I remove their winter interior panels, _plus_ I plan to use Snelgrove boards. I would be happy to to have one additional daughter queen from each of them, but I want to do that as late as possible so I have plentiful, well-fed drones and settled conditions to get the new queens mated as close to the Solstice as possible.

I will, of course, also be watching Queen B and her daughter closely, in case I have misjudged their swarm plans, somehow. I don't really want to make increase from them this year as I only want to have about six hives and don't want to kill any queens or part with any excess colonies to stay at those numbers. I think I will just use Matt's technique on them, but just in case I wll have Snelgrove boards standing by.

I will see if I can find a link to my series of threads on my Muddle-Headed Splits which will reveal all the timing details more accurately than I can remember. But remember, when it got too embarassing I was afraid to post about the continued cluelessness. I did- finally - get expert local help, though, to eventually put things right, which included a newspaper combine. Only after my mentor went through my other two hives frame by frame, did I feel reassured that I had passed safely through my first swarm season and we could just settle down for a bang-up honey year that only required me to keep slapping fresh boxes of empty comb on top every 10 days or so.

Swarm management, to me at least, is the most complex and fraught part of bee-husbandry. Which makes sense because it is the one aspect where beekeepers and their bees are really at fundamental cross-purposes. That it comes directly after the prolonged anxiety and worry over winter survival, at least up here where winters are fierce and dangerous for tropical bugs, seems to me to be especially hard. I didn't feel secure again with my bees until mid-summer. I hope my experience is different this year, but with bees, ya never know!


ETA: First mention of my anti-swarm activity - predictably a frantic plea for help: 

And more drama when it becomes clear that I have messed up: 

But wait it gets worse:

But what I didn't have the moxie to write about is that some of the re-re-splits (got that?) never were able to cook up a queen (as I had feared), and eventually started to get robbed out. What a mess! But remember, in the end my bees faithfully saved the day for me (like the always do!) and I wound up with exactly what I hoped for: Queen B and _one_ of daughters. But at some unnecessary cost to them due to my complete ineptitude, at least to Buttercup who was slow to recover from her travails.

Also interesting is noting in passng that my sugar rolls during all this had them just on the cusp of needing treatment, but I deferred because of OTSOTBN program. But this year, I have OAV at the ready and could treat as needed. What a relief that will be.

Enj.


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## Eduardo Gomes (Nov 10, 2014)

Thank U. If I see queen cups with an egg, even without royal jelly, and at the time of swarming, I split the colony. I do not give names to my queens, but you inspired me .
Queens done near the solstice has resulted fine with me. As a rule these queens the following year do not give me concerns about swarming.

I know you are having a hard time with the cold spell. I wish you that your bees overcome this challenge and the heat come quickly.


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## gww (Feb 14, 2015)

enj
You must type 200 words a minute. I know I am off topic but can't help taking my hat off to you. I enjoy all the comment and sometimes learn something.
gww


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## BadBeeKeeper (Jan 24, 2015)

enjambres:

your links are bad, the have an extra "http//" in them.


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## MattDavey (Dec 16, 2011)

It really doesn't need to be that complicated (takes more effort to describe it than do it).

This is what I do:



Pull out 2 new frames from the new box before opening the hive.
I typically only work in the top brood box.
Take out the outermost frame from the brood box and put it straight in the new box
Then slide the next frame out to the outer edge of the box.
You now have a gap between frames, blow some smoke in there.
Look for capped brood. If none, slide the next frame over and again look for capped brood.
Once you see brood, take out the previous frame before that and look for eggs or open brood.
You now know where the edge of the Broodnest is and you've only pulled out 1 or 2 frames to look at.
That is the only brood frame(s) that I look at. No need to look for queen cells, because if they are making wax and building comb they are unlikely to want to swarm.
Give them 2-4 new frames to work on. This helps to decrease the frequency that you need to go into the hive.

If you only see 2-3 queen cells, DO NOT WORRY. This means they are superseding. As with Checkerboarding, the Broodnest can fill 3 brood boxes. The queen may be running out of stored sperm and needs to be replaced.

@Robbin: Drawn comb can be used beside the Broodnest. As it makes room for the queen to lay in and gives them more storage room. But my aim with this method is to get them making wax throughout swarm season.


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## Robbin (May 26, 2013)

MattDavey said:


> It really doesn't need to be that complicated (takes more effort to describe it than do it).
> 
> This is what I do:
> 
> @Robbin: Drawn comb can be used beside the Broodnest. As it makes room for the queen to lay in and gives them more storage room. But my aim with this method is to get them making wax throughout swarm season.


Thanks Matt, I thought that might be the actual goal, so I will go with that. Last year I got swarmed a lot, I really want to cut down on it this year and this seems like the easiest way if you aren't going to split. I am going to build some nucs this year, so I can use the extra brood comb in those. I've considered going natural cell size in the brood chamber, this is a good way to start toward that practice. 

Thanks!


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## MattDavey (Dec 16, 2011)

@Enjambres: If you want to use a acronym, how about *OSB* ?

I usually refer to it as Opening the Sides, but OTS is already known as On the Spot queen raising.

In regard to raising queens and doing splits I would do these around the Summer Soltice, so after the main flow.

As you often get 3 deeps with brood, I would take several brood frames from the top brood box and use those to make a large split. 

Either take the queen with the split, or raise a few queens using the OTS method in the original hive first. Do this 1 week before splitting. I found I need to move at least 2 notched frames up higher, away from the brood nest to help queen cells to be made. Make sure there is a frame of pollen next to the notched frames as well. So the 3 frames together.

The split soon fills a full deep, and the new queen builds up a good population for winter.


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## MattDavey (Dec 16, 2011)

Tomson said:


> As I am picturing this, you are putting in a frame with a 1/2 sheet of wax vert. in the middle next to the outer most frame of brood, where am I making a hole? Or is that just the opening where there is no wax on the new frame you are referring to?


The Hole(s) is where there's no foundation in the frame.

Placing a medium frame in a deep box will also create a Hole in the Broodnest.


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## jcolon (Sep 12, 2014)

Pics are failing to upload. I will post once i figure it out. I took pictures after a week and very good result are shown.


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## poppy1 (Feb 1, 2013)

Lots of good information here


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## Tomson (Feb 9, 2015)

Hi,

I used this method to good results. I did not have drawn comb so I used medium frames with wax foundation in the 10 frame deep boxes. Under Matt's guidance I placed one of the new frames at the first point that the brood started. This was going in from the outside. After the first week I had drawn comb on each of the new frames. This is just what we were hoping for, to get the bees into wax production frame of mind and to not hold it for after the swarm. 

I made some videos of inspections that have some of the results. I didn't edit them for this post, but you can see the results in the before and after.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=80CIEBM2oiI

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=clN9ZnXOZLc


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## Tomson (Feb 9, 2015)

Double Post. Please delete.


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## dixieswife (Apr 15, 2013)

We're trying this out this year. We're in our third year of beekeeping and getting more successful each year. 

Our situation is thus: we have one Lang hive. We had a deep brood chamber and two mediums of honey (much of it sugar syrup honey from feeding) for the winter. We wanted to be all mediums, but having that deep in there threw our plans off a bit. So we bought one more deep and will go two deeps for brood and shallows for supers. We have a lot of medium frames of comb, some built out to deep size on the bottom and we want to slowly replace all that with deep frames. 

We use foundationless frames. 

What we have done is add the 2nd deep and *some* of the medium frames from the old medium boxes to give them honey. The queen had been building brood in the single deep only. It looked something like this:

NNDDDDNN (medium)
DDDDBBBD 

After removing the medium super, adding the deep 2nd box:

NNNDDNNN
DDDDBBBD

We want them to build up the empty deep frames and this seemed like a good, easy way to go about it. 
After manipulating:

NNNDDNN
DNBBBND

Spring has come quite early here - bees were out getting pollen and nectar by mid-Feb. We checked after a week and this is what it looked like:

NNDDDDNN
DDBBBBDD

We've done a second manipulation, moving some "N" frames down in the first box and a "D" frame up top. It turns out that the queen *had* laid some brood we did not catch in one of the medium frames we pulled and we found some chilled dead larvae. Awww. Surprised we didn't see it. But she's since expanded the broodnest in the bottom deep, so that's good. I think.

Even though obviously not the same kind of set up, we're using the same general idea on our top bar hive. Like the Lang, they overwintered with about 3-4 frames of brood and many bars of honey. Queen is going nuts in there. 
Now it's about 16 bars of brood, and they've used up most of their stores. We have some empty bars and half-built bars, so we moved those to bracket the broodnest and they are building up on them. Sweet! 

We plan to check again this weekend and move some more frames around as needed.


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## MattDavey (Dec 16, 2011)

Fantastic! Thanks for sharing your results.


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## marant (Jan 18, 2014)

Matt

I am trying your opening technique in one hive this year. So far I have put the second box on and moved 2 frames from the side of the broodnest in the bottom box to the center of the second box. 

I am about to take a look in the second box (10 days) to see what has happened. If I find they have built out the second box (8 frame mediums) to 6-7 frames and need to add the third box do I go down into the bottom box and remove the two frames next to the brood again, or do I just add the third box with empty frames. I am assuming that the queen has not moved the broodnest up into the second box.


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## MattDavey (Dec 16, 2011)

You can take the outside (drawn) frames of the any box that has brood, whether that is the bottom box or if they they have moved the broodnest into and drawn out most of the second box.

If the second box is only partially drawn out then just use the outside frames from the bottom box.

Always put at least two drawn frames into a new box.


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## IAmTheWaterbug (Jun 4, 2014)

I suppose this is a good reason to go double-deep (instead of deep-medium) next season.


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## MattDavey (Dec 16, 2011)

Really up to you. For example you could also go to 3 mediums for wintering.

With the wintering of a deep and medium, if you have brood in the medium then there really isn't much of a problem. You can Open the Sides of the Broodnest using mediums and it doesn't take long for the bees to draw out another medium. Just leave the deep on the bottom as is.


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## markus (Oct 22, 2013)

Matt, what do you do with all the drone brood that gets produced when the bees draw out so much drone comb? Do you leave them to hatch out or destroy the drone cells and let the bees clean them out and fill with honey?


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## MattDavey (Dec 16, 2011)

Let them emerge and they get filled with honey. Don't mind honey from cells that have been used for brood.

If you use a vertically cut half sheet of foundation as Lauri Miller does, drone cells on the sides of the frames are not so much of an issue. As you get a large area of worker size cells in the middle of the frames and the outside cells get filled with feed.


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## Jadeguppy (Jul 19, 2017)

Does this work with foundationless frames?

Early swarms start late February here. Can I start this the first week of January or is that too soon.


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## enjambres (Jun 30, 2013)

Yes, it not only works with foundationless frames, it requires foundationless frames (or Lauri Miller's partial foundation modification.)

I have started to use Lauri's modification, exclusively, using 2/3 of a sheet of foundation in the center of a foundationless frame. I found I got more-rapid comb drawing, as well as more thorough drawing (initiating comb-drawing activity of some kind is the whole point of this effort, IMO, not the creation of new permanent combs.) I simply break off 1/3 from a sheet of foundation. I then combine the broken-off piece with another one to make up a 2/3 assembly. So, two sheets of foundation will fill three frames. I anchor the foundation in the frame with two small blobs of wax smushed into the groove along the bottom rail. 

Having foundation in a good share of the frame keeps down the enormous numbers of drones that you would get without it. I want workers more than drones at that season.

I should point out that these MattDavey frames are, in my yard, mostly a temporary item. I insert them one at a time, on a single side of the broodnest. When they've started in on one frame, I will add another one on the other side of the brood nest. As I am also, repeatedly and concurrently, doing reversals i.e., taking a new box without brood and setting it on top of one with brood, and thus encouraging the bees to move their brood area steadily "upward" from box to box. Once they've established brood in the "new" top box, I will go in and add a MattDavey-style frame on one side of the brood nest, then repeat and do the other afterward. And so on, throughout our long northeastern spring, which can stretch out for two to three months in most years.

When they have finally settled down, I inspect these new frames. As a rule they are not up the best standards of being fully, and evenly drawn out. Not to mention that there are sections of thicker drone brood sized cells on either side. So I will start slipping them outward, to get them out of active use as brood frames. By the start of summer (July), they've got no babies in them, so I remove the entire frame and replace it with a new frame (freshly waxed plastic foundation) as they will still be in the last stages of comb-drawing eagerness.

Then I cut the wax out of the foundationless areas on either side of the foundation section, and scrape off most of the wax off the foundation part. This is pretty nice wax as it has only been in service for a short period. Then I keep these MattDavey-frames ready to deploy the following spring. (After a trip through the deep freeze to kill any bug eggs.) If there is enough honey in these cells to warrant it, I will cut the comb and honey off and offer it to the bees on a plastic tray set on top of the frames inside the hive. The bees will quickly scavenge the honey and leave the dry wax for me to take over to the solar wax melter.

In general I only deploy four to six of these frames per hive each year (max of two-per box times three deep boxes per stack). Occasionally they make an extra nice one, which will be retained in the main cohort of brood frames, Or I may press a MD frame into service in a pinch, for housing a swarm or split, etc. But I have found it most satisfactory to keep the frames separate and use them in the spring because the combs are just not as perfectly drawn, and even as the one that are made on foundation. If that didn't bug you, then you could just see them as permanent additions. Except that if your goal is to remain foundationless, then you'd be gradually integrating them into your brood frames.

Though if you chose to use only fully empty frames (not partial sheets) it wouldn't make a difference. It's just that the best foundationless comb-drawing seems to happen, at least for me, much later in the season when nectar supplies and temperatures are better suited to the task. Keep in mind that these frames are deployed to somewhat upend the very early-spring bees' plans regarding getting ready to swarm, as well as to get them into the waxing-making "mood." Which is why I think the quality of the combs is less-desirable than ones made later on. It took me awhile to figure out that it was perfectly OK to have dedicated MD frames ready to deploy each year, with no worries about how they were drawn. It doesn't work to give them drawn comb, with cells, on the foundation section in the middle. They need to be presented with un-drawn areas, both open and with foundation, but if there is a thin layer left from scraping it off the previous year, that seems to be fine. And having a set of frames with the center sections all made up, saves a lot of fuss and trouble in a very busy season.

(Up until now, I could always locate these frames because they were wood amidst my normal all-black Pierco combo frames. But this year, due to SHB pressure, I will begin transitioning to foundation and wood frames for all frames, so I will soon lose this visual advantage unless I follow through on my plan to paint the top surface of the MD frames.)

Since you're in FL, your "early spring" may have already started. (Mine will start three months from now, i.e. late March, with swarm season starting usually around the third week of May.) And you may have a situation more similar to Matt's (he's in Australia), where a single manipulation of adding an empty frame on either side of the brood nest in one go, perhaps successively, is the best way. I was bemused and wary, at first ,of adopting this technique because it seemed unlikely to work in SE Australia as well as southeast of the Adirondacks in NYS But it does, with some modifications. The main item regarding timing is that the hive as to be big enough to be able to handle at least one empty space of the side of the brood frame area. I usually start adding in the MD- manipulation about three weeks to a month after I've done my first reversal, or about the middle of April, here. Temps are still below freezing most nights at that point.

Give it a try in your area, but keep an eye on things to make sure it is doing what you'd like it to do. I can't imagine running bees in the spring without using it. And this technique, along with my other anti-swarm efforts, have completely prevented me from ever loosing a swarm from my yard. My bees stay where I want them to be, and without the need to constantly split them every year. Since, in general, I also never have any winter losses, avoiding having to make splits to control swarming, allows me to keep a steady and controlled number of hives. That is an enormous benefit for me. Beekeeping in the current mode of constantly making splits and nucs and more colonies to make up for losses would simply not work for me.

Nancy,


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## Mike Gillmore (Feb 25, 2006)

Jadeguppy said:


> Early swarms start late February here. Can I start this the first week of January or is that too soon.


The timing to start this depends on whether the bees will be ready to draw new comb. Every region will be different, so I'll just add what I've experienced locally in my area as food for thought.

Our swarm season usually starts up in early May. That means the colony will be "preparing" to swarm by mid-April. I've tried inserting foundationless frames into the broodnest in April but the bees don't seem to be ready to draw new comb until early May, but by then it's too late to "prevent" swarming. It is necessary for me to use other swarm prevention methods in April such as reversing, adding empty "drawn" brood frames, etc. Once we are into the month of May the bees are more than ready with wax makers to build new comb.

I don't feed my bees pollen patties or supplements in early Spring to stimulate brood rearing, I let them respond on their own to the weather and local bloom cycles. Perhaps if I did feed them early they would be ready to build comb in April. Our major nectar flows are in June, sometimes including a week or so before and after June. That is when I prefer to have my colonies at their peak, not so much in the first half of May. 

You may have completely different circumstances in Florida and this may not apply in your area. Just wanted to mention it as something to watch out for. Try inserting an empty frame on the side of the brood nest in January and see what happens. If they don't touch it be prepared to adopt other swarm prevention methods for a few weeks or until they begin drawing comb.


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## baybee (Jan 10, 2016)

Jadeguppy said:


> ...Early swarms start late February here. Can I start this the first week of January or is that too soon.


I would try inserting half-foundation frames and see what they do with it. However, make sure you read "all the fine print". After several rounds of OSB you may end up with a few frames worth of drone brood because the foundation-less gaps more often that not are filled with drone comb. This may result in explosive, out of control mite proliferation, typical of climates where bees have no winter brood breaks. Swarm season here is long, too, so I ended up cutting out sealed drone brood in freshly drawn gaps regularly for a few months.


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## Jadeguppy (Jul 19, 2017)

Thank you for the information. Our average low in January is 45 with average day time temps above 50. Typically we have fly days most of the year. Last year temps were 20-25 degrees below average. This will be my 4th year, but only my second going into spring with a hive. I have three 10 frames and four nucs that are still alive. Last year was the year to improve splitting. I have no extra comb beyond what they are in. Running nearly all mediums. My first instinct is to let nature take its course, but I want to be a bit more proactive this year and really need comb. Is all the comb drawn as drone? The bit of foundationless they drew last summer was small natural cell sized, which I like for the potential help with mites. If feeding for comb, does it need to be pollen and sugar? Mike's suggestion of just give it a try is probably what I need to do. Last look, the cluster filled a couple of frames. Just double checked and even when the temps are predicted to get into the 30s at night, the daytime is mid 50s and higher. Throwing that out there in case it can help figure out my timing.


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## Mike Gillmore (Feb 25, 2006)

Jadeguppy said:


> , but I want to be a bit more proactive this year and really need comb. Is all the comb drawn as drone?


Based on my experience they will usually draw a lot of drone comb during and just after the swarm season. I find that following Michael Bush's method of inserting foundationless frames in between frames of solid worker brood gives me the best chance that the bees will draw worker comb rather than drone comb. But there needs to be plenty of bees in the hive to fill the gap made with the empty frame. This works best for me just after swarm season has ended. If you stay at it you can really build up a lot of extra drawn comb in a month or two.


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## Jadeguppy (Jul 19, 2017)

Okay. So use this method prior to swarm and checkerboard after swarm season starts. Our season starts at the end of Feb/start of March. My local guy usually has made nucs from swarm cells and starts selling them at the end of Feb. I think we are going to give this a try now on nucs and try Squarepeg/Walt's checkerboarding on the bigger hives in early Feb.


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## aiannar974 (Mar 29, 2017)

Can you use plastic foundation in the empty frames instead of just empty frames? Would it help with a hole cut in it?

Anthony


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## Mike Gillmore (Feb 25, 2006)

Jadeguppy said:


> Okay. So use this method prior to swarm and checkerboard after swarm season starts.


Checkerboarding Walt Wright style is done with "drawn comb" early in the season as the colony is building up. 

If you are inserting empty frames into the brood nest or on the sides after swarm season, only do this with one or two frames at a time. Repeat as they draw out the comb. Too many at once can stretch out the brood and create problems. Just wanted to clarify.


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## Saltybee (Feb 9, 2012)

Mike Gillmore said:


> Too many at once can stretch out the brood and create problems. .


Proven that myself.


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## enjambres (Jun 30, 2013)

Lots of commingled and confusing terms and ideas floating about!

"Checkerboarding", in the context that Walt Wright is using, requires ALL drawn combs and it is done early in the year, _but not in the brood area._ It is the alternation of drawn combs with stores and drawn combs with empty cells. The bees are expected to move up into the checkerboarded box, eat the food there, and then use both types of combs as brood areas. It is done in the very early spring.

Sometimes he word checkerboarding is used to describe something else: the alternation of drawn and and undrawn combs to accelerate and facilitate comb drawing, and the drawing of straight, even foundationless comb. Empty frames, offered in bulk, may look like good places to make comb, but the bees tend to see it differently. And the result is often uneven, wavy, troublesome combs. However empty frames inserted between a pair of already drawn frames that act as guides turn out much better. You can place the empty frame between both brood and honey combs, but if you are using active brood frames as comb-guides it has to be warm enough, and there have to be enough bees to cope with the sudden "hole" in the brood nest area. This typically doesn't happen until late spring, or early summer so this form of checkerboarding is not an anti-swarming tactic as that would be too late. But even later, you have to be thoughtful about how man and where the the frames are inserted into the boxes. A honey super can be completely fulled with an empty/drawn alternation and if the flow is strong enough you'll get decent new comb out of the deal. In a brood nest, I would be more cautious. In warm weather a frame or two inserted right in the middle, in an alternating fashion with drawn, and active worker brood cells, will probably be OK and get drawn out as nice cells. A wholesale, full box alternation, will probably not be as completely successful, as you'll likely get one or more of the outer frames drawn as drone cells. Of curse, boys are nice to have around the house, too, but sometimes there can be too many of them. (Or at least more than we, as beekeepers, would like unless we plan on using drone trapping as a varroa management tool.)

Full frames with undrawn foundation do NOT work as well as empty frames, or partially empty frames when deployed in MattDavey's method. You need the vacant space, just outside of the active brood area for this to work as described. And only a single frame, or a single one on either side of the active brood nest at one time. You can repeat the manipulation after they have drawn out and placed brood in the first rounds of MD frames. You would do this is you are running only one brood box (say, one of the 12-frame Dadant behemoths). I run three deeps as my brood area, and I am continually reversing them to keep the bees brooding up into empty cells, so I almost never add more than two MD frames per box, and often less than than two. As I explained above, I don;t find these frames, which I am primarily using as an anti-swarm technique to very high quality additions to my comb stock. Not like those I would make later on in the season by inserting a frame between two active combs. I struggled with this until I had the insight that it was perfectly fine to have a set of dedicated MD frames that I deployed each year, for that purpose alone. And if I wanted to increase my frame stock (and who doesn't?) then I should have a plan to do that when the resources (bees and nectar) were more conducive to that project, all by itself.

I don't like foundationless frames more than those made on plastic foundation. I think foundation saves the bees some work in our short northern comb-making periods. I provide an extra layer of hand-applied wax to Pierco combo frames and my bees, given opportunity and the nectar to do support it will draw out, and fill, a full box of 10 deep frames in a couple of weeks. For various reasons I have always had them tasked with doing that in each have every year, (often more than one box). 

If foundationless frames are your goal, you'll get there faster, and with less wasted effort by the bees, if you start with getting the bees to drawn comb on foundation. The original foundation-supported frames will be the guides for the foundationless frames in the second and subsequent years.

Starting out completely foundationless in Lang equipment (with a full box with just empty frames) may work, but you will need to be extremely intrusive in the early days and weeks, correcting and redirecting the bees' efforts every few days. And you will have to be prepared to cull swathes of brood that are placed in inappropriate or poorly-formed combs. It just seems easier to get them to drawn a first set of foundation-guided frames, and then use those as models for foundationless frames in other years. Yes, folks who do TBH are completely foundationless, but they need to devote the same amount of trouble and time to monitor and correct wild comb there, too. I just hate being at such cross purposes with my bees' efforts, and I am lazy enough to want to pen box with new frames and admire all their work, not fuss at it and cause them to remake some of it.

Foundationless may sound like the simpler solution, but is not. You could think of foundation as a communication device: telling the bees where the best place for them to focus their efforts to make combs. You are not locked into foundation forever, though. A first round of foundation will set the stage for a much easier task afterward.

New beekeepers often see sets of frames, and even boxes, untended for a single hive, as discrete, dedicated things. In fact, they are at best temporary housing, work spaces, and movable furniture for the bees. 

Nancy


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## MattDavey (Dec 16, 2011)

Thanks Nancy for your comments.

Nothing more I need to add, just a few points I want to emphasize.

Opening the Sides of the Broodnest is intended as a Swarm Prevention method, especially for beekeepers who don't have much drawn comb. So it needs to be started a few weeks before swarm season and done at least a few times during swarm season. So timing is based on when swarm season starts in your area.

The main objectives as a Swarm Prevention method are to:

Encourage Broodnest Expansion
Trigger Wax Making

Another objective is to have little impact on the current Broodnest and so that it is not as susceptible to sudden cold weather, which can happen in other methods.

To be clear, we are expecting Drone comb to be built in any "holes" before or during swarm season.

I don't have a problem with using Drawn Empty Frames instead of Partial Foundation Frames, as this still encourages Broodnest expansion. But if there is a lot of nectar coming in at the start of swarm season, it may just get filled with nectar before the Broodnest is expanded into it.

I would suggest using Partially Drawn Empty Frames (at least 1/2 the frame drawn) rather than Fully Drawn Frames so that there is still a "hole" that needs to be filled in to complete the Broodnest.

Another thing, for the bees to move up into a new box, I have found there needs to be at least 3 frames with honey, ideally 4 should be placed in the new box, all together in the middle. With less that 3 frames, the frames may get emptied out and not be treated as part of the nest.

If the hive is full of bees and you have brood in 2 boxes, you could move 2 outside frames from each box, up into the new box to make up the 4 frames.


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## squarepeg (Jul 9, 2010)

matt lays out the osb technique nicely on his webpage:

http://daveybees.wikidot.com/openingthesides

good job matt, and happy holidays to you and yours!


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## MattDavey (Dec 16, 2011)

Thanks Squarepeg, good to hear from you.

Happy New Year!


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## Jadeguppy (Jul 19, 2017)

Yes, I did use checkerboarding to mean alternating and to mean Walt's checkerboarding. Easy to interchange it, but not productive for understanding which is being referred to. It sounds like the start of Feb will be when I should time put an empty frame next tot he brood nest as well as using walt's on my bigger hive(s). The main Walt method I'm thinking of has multiple boxes of comb, so it will depend on what they have emptied out. March, maybe April-June should be honey time and time for comb building in honey boxes. Thank you for the help on timing. I have a better plan now. Very difficult to figure out when most of the country is still waiting for their season to start.


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## enjambres (Jun 30, 2013)

Walt's technique was used by him early in the spring, i.e. late Feb or March. He was in the south TN, northern AL area, I think. So Feb in FL may be too late for it.

I use Walt's technique first, in my earliest inspection (end of of March, 1st week of April most years). And I use it (and box reversal) for at least a month before I begin to use MattDavey's manipulation. In practice this means that I usually don't start Matt's plan until AFTER I've done a second box reversal. In relation to my prime swarm season, I guess I do Walt's thing a bit less than two months before and Matt's about a month before.

I am reluctant to add any empty space around the brood nest in the period between first inspection and when the hive has built up enough to be able to fill it with bee bodies to keep the brood warm at night. My last frost date is the third week of May up here in Z4b/Z5a. The extended break up of winter in the north is vastly different from the shorter transition in warmer parts of the country. So it's not just the different temperatures (both daytime for foraging possibilities, and night for brood-warming requirements) but it's also the length of time it takes to transition that drives the geographic/climatological 
differences.

My bees will start brood by the end of January, and then it will be nearly two full brood cycles before they can expect to be out foraging most days. And another one before they are ready to swarm.

Nancy


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## Jadeguppy (Jul 19, 2017)

Good to know. I just got into my 4 nucs. I'm pretty sure the one I expect to die out is still going to die out. The other three are doing well. One had a double sided frame of brood and four frames of bees. One with water on the bottom has a baseball size of capped brood, but an 1"-1.5" of young/eggs around that and the other side has a full hand size of young eggs/larvae. New comb too. Since it actually had a deep frame and built some of the mediums to deeps, I had to put it in a double deep and leave the sides empty. Most of the nuc was full of bees, so I think they will be able to handle it. Many are out flying. My strongest nuc has 5 frames of comb, but two boxes of bees and five sides with eggs/larvae as well as new wax building. The are bringing in pollen from somewhere. I didn't expect to see white comb. They haven't even eaten half the sugar I put in there months ago.

I hope to get back out there to look into the full sized hives and may give walt's technique a go now since some new comb is in the nucs. Had to take a break though due to problems with the neighbors dog sticking it's nose under their fence and trying to bite mine. Thankfully it is only a jagged tear on her nose, but my patience are about out. Not good to work bees while pissed.


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