# My new Warre and busy girls



## herbhome

very nice!


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## gww

Mine looks a lot clunkyer then yours cause I was sloppy on the cleats and put them on all four sides and it is your other thread that made me fill it with bees. I am looking forward to letting it set and see what it does. Maby next year we can compare notes with each other. I would like it if somebody gave me a couple of free hives but the best I get is swarm traps being able to be hung at all my relitives after I assure them it won't cause them to get stung. The warres do look neat don't they? Yours looks nice.
gww


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## JConnolly

GWW

I wasn't in any kind of hurry when I cut it all out. So far I have a lot of work into this Warre but not a lot of money. A $6 spray can of spar urethane. The wood came from an old water bed frame that was long gone that I planed down to 24mm thick. All the comb frames were made from a board I got for a buck fifty from the cull pile at HD. The stain was left over from years ago. 

I originally planned on five boxes with windows but I decided to eliminate the windows since they were going to take a lot of time to finish, so I had to use the sides of the fifth box as solid sides for the other boxes, so I've only got four Warre boxes now. To make a fifth I'll have to buy a 2x10 and mill it to 24mm. Probably not going to do that. I can take top and bottom boards that were going to be on the window wall and make a 120mm high super that I could set up for comb honey sections like Warre had in his book on page 93. On the off chance I need more than four boxes I could throw that on. Not going to need it this year for sure though. Gonna make a feeder from a 2x4 that I've been tripping over next Sunday. It should hold about 3-1/2 quarts of syrup.

It instantly became the favorite hive of the family just because Warres look so neat. How it is to work with though is what I'll be finding out. Definitely let's compare notes on this little diversion.


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## gww

I made the big feeder in warre's book. It sit a year and the wood movement made it leak but that is another story however one more paint of latex and it is back on the hive right now to give the swarm a small jump start on thier comb building.
Cheers
gww


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## JConnolly

Well, I made the feeder from that 2 x 4 I had laying around, so its only 3-1/2" high. I planed it down to 24mm thick so that it would be the same thickness as my box walls. The bottom slopes 1/2". I pretty much followed Warre's plan from the book except for the lower height, and I put a clear plexiglass cover over the bee access area. It's glued, caulked, and coated with spar urethane and it held water for 15 minutes with no leaks. I took the box with the jar feeders in it off put it on and filled it with syrup. And promptly overfilled it. Clumsy. :scratch: The girls already crawling up the entrance got well candied.

For reference, a Warre feeder made from a 2 x 4 and 1/2" plywood holds just barely over 3 quarts of syrup.










edited to fix broken image links


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## Jlockhart29

Very nice. I had to reread to see you made them out of old bed frames. I bought my first one and then made my last 2 myself. That's half the fun. Made them from cedar and tung oiled them as well as 2 "Fat bee Man" feeders. I mod them just a little with a bottom screen so I can peak in on them when I feed without screwing with them to much.


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## JConnolly

Ten day update on my little venture outside of traditional Langstroth hives.


Comb building on all 8 bars. Nice and straight.










edited to fix image link


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## gww

JC

I haven't looked In mine. Nice pictures. I doubt I take any cause when I get in next I will probly get in a few others as well and am not really that organized.

I have a bad feeling that mine is in the process of getting robbed out. My feeder leaked and I thought I had ot worked out but the last pint I put in was on the ground under the hive. We had three inches of rain last night and it was ok some portion of the day today and I saw bees at the cracks where the boxes set on each other. 

I have several more small splits in the yard and am feeding the new swarms and small splits and those bees are not being robbed. I have the entrance reduce pretty good and there is a flow on though the rain may have put a short term dent in it.

My swarms last year did not draw out the comb as fast as your packages are seeming to do.
Looks great.
Cheers
gww


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## JConnolly

Update on this little Warre feeder cobbled from a 2x4. It absolutely does not drown bees. Aside from the small volume, I've been really pleased on how well it performed, so pleased that I may make one for my Langstroths where I've always used frame feeders. Monday I removed the feeder for the remainder of the season until the fall 2:1 feeding.

I have now fed the bees two batches of 1:1 syrup (2 quarts + 4lb bag of sugar) and had zero drowned bees. Not a single dead bee in the feeder. The feeder board has a slight angle cut on it on the syrup side, the bottom is 1-1/2" thick and the top is 3/4" thick, forming a steep ramp for the bees to approach the syrup. On the hive side it is straight up and down. I cut the syrup side ramp on the bandsaw and left the surface rough. The barrier board, the one between the feeding ramp and the syrup chamber, has 1/16" clearance under it between it and the feeder bottom. Syrup can run under it. Bees can't crawl through after they suck down the last of the syrup. There were tons of bees hanging out in the feeder space after the syrup reservoir was empty, but a few puffs of smoke directed at the tiny slit under the bottom of the barrier board sent them scurrying into the hive.

It has one flaw. At the front of the feeder the plexiglass doesn't quite come up flush with the feeder sides. When the quilt box is set on top it leaves a tiny gap. The little sugar ants found this gap and held a neighborhood block party.

edited to remove broken image link


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## JConnolly

One month update on my venture into Warre beekeeping.

The hive started with two boxes. Here is the top box tipped on its side. You can see that all the bars are filled out and that the bees have finished off the comb at the bottom without a bottom bar on the frame just like Bernhard said they should. They have not built any ladder comb or burr comb on top of the top bars in the lower box or waxed the frames to the lower box. The top box was surprisingly heavy.











This next picture is the lower box tipped on its side, the one you can see the top bars of in lower part of the previous picture. They are starting to draw out the lower box now. The far left outside frame has a roughly 3x3 comb drawn. The next three frames are nearing completion and the frame five is about half drawn. Frame six has a very small comb hanging on it. The girls were holding hands and measuring on the other two top bars. 











The population is strong and growing and I think this hive is about to explode. I assembled the frames for the next box and waxed the vee guides this morning because I think I'm going to be nadiring it before next Saturday.

edited to fix broken image links


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## gww

Jc
Looks great, thanks for sharing. Love the pictures.
gww


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## gww

Jc
My hive is not going to make it but this is how they are drawing comb.









You had ask me one time and we did it about the same time but I caused mine some giant setback with robbing, and other things.
Just thought you might like to see and I would still like to hear about yours.
Cheers
gww


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## JConnolly

Thanks for showing. Sorry to hear its not doing well.

I nadired a third box and they drew it out most of the way. I didn't harvest because I fed them heavily with syrup early on to stimulate comb production so I think the top box has a fair bit of syrup still in it. I think I'll winter them on the three boxes even though Warre's book said two boxes was enough. I\ve resisted the temptation to look inside for about a month, Warre's philosophy was that a beek can't do anything positive in the brood chamber. They are docile and happy, its been a zero sting hive all year, that's a good sign.


Sorry about all my pics. Thanks to the Photobucket idiots all my pictures are gone. May the company soon RIP alongside all the other defunct internet companies that caught the stupids.


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## gww

Jc....
I think france was like zone 8 or something and so three boxes may be right for you. It also might help next year keep your bees in your box instead of the trees. Next year when you put box four, five and six on, it will be exciting when time to take them off. 
On mine, I thought they should be dead months ago and so have not been counting them but thought you might be interested in how they are using the box with my fixed frames.
Cheers
gww


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## JConnolly

Here are some of the pictures to replace all the ones above with the broken links.

The first picture is my new Warre from the opening post. 

The second picture is the feeder that I described above that I made from a scrap 2x4 with busy bees slurping down the syrup. I took this picture on the day after I installed the feeder and there was about 1/2 of the syrup left.


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## JConnolly

Here are some more pictures from the broken links above.

Here are the pictures from the ten day update post. Lots of new comb in the top box and they were drawing it nice and straight.


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## JConnolly

These are the pictures from the one month update. 

This picture is the top box, same box as above, but after one month you can see how the bees have finished off the drawn comb and rounded out the bottoms just like Bernhard described without attaching it to the top bars of the box below.










This is the picture of the lower box from the one month update.


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## JConnolly

This shows how I cut the vee profile for the top bars. 


I started by cutting a 2x4 into 650mm long sections. You'll get 4 top bars from each piece.
I tilted the blade to about 20° and cut the vee in the center in two passes, cutting a vee in each side of the board. 
I made straight cuts to cut the top bar to width. 

The picture shows the block at this point.

*SAFETY FIRST* To make the next two rip cuts safely you should use a push block that has a shoe on the back (similar to this) to push all the offcut pieces all the way through the blade. You should also use a zero clearance insert for doing this.


Making two rips per top bar per side I first cut the waste free to finish forming the vee profile
Then I ripped the top bar free. 
I cut the top bars to length, 340 mm.
Last I cut the notch end of each bar back 15 mm to form the frame rests.

If you do this from a 2 x 4, at this point you might be tempted to try and get more top bars out of the scrap that is left. Just don't. Please don't risk your fingers.


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## gww

JC...
Thanks for taking the time to repost your pictures.
gww


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## JConnolly

*Re: My new Warre - So ends the experiment*

They absconded!!! 

This fall has been unusually warm. Last weekend, the Sunday after Thanksgiving it was 70°. So I checked on all my hives. The Warre was full of busy girls doing last minute foraging. 

It was still 65° today, but I decided to go ahead and put on the quilt boxes. And that was when I discovered the Warre was completely empty. There were four dead bees on the bottom board, none in the hive. Sometime in the last five days they bolted. It had not been robbed yet. The top two boxes were still packed wall to wall with honey, the bottom box had some brood under a honey dome.

I considered giving some of it to my other hives (all Langstroths) but the compatibility problem is the main reason I decided not to continue with a Warre once this hive was gone. I decided to harvest. It's a dark but tasty honey.

I was hoping to make some queens from this queen next spring as she was a great queen with gentle girls.

So there I was being happy we had a very warm fall and the girls were still foraging - usually there is a foot of snow on the ground by now - when it occurred to me that had it been a normal December weekend they would probably not have flown.

I'll leave it out as a swarm trap next spring, but if no one takes up residence I have no plans at this point to put a package in it.

I'm building a long Langstroth this winter, plus I've got a dozen hive boxes cut out and sitting in my shop waiting for assembly, so growth is going to to there.

The Warre was a pretty hive, and it was neat to watch the bees build beautiful comb and round out and finish the bottoms. And I am going to copy that feeder for my Langstroths because it absolutely did not drown bees. 

So ends my Warre experiment.


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## Dan the bee guy

*Re: My new Warre - So ends the experiment*

They absconded. That sends me a warning did you monitor for mites? If not how do you know they absconded and didn't just collapse from mites?


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## JWPalmer

*Re: My new Warre - So ends the experiment*

Hate to say it JC, but you just described the classic signs of a mite collapse. Autopsy the remaining capped brood and look for mites on the worker pupae. Check the tops of the empty cells for white specks. The crash happens very fast so one week is reasonable. You should probably give your other hives a dose of OA to kill any mites from this hive that they are bringing home.


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## gww

Jc
My warre still has bees comming and going but I can't see how it is going to make it through winter. It just never really got to critical mass during build up. I can't believe it even has bees in it. Sorry to hear about your hive. Me putting bees in mine was kinda a fluke too. I was sorta leaving it out incase a swarm moved in when one of my hives swarmed and the warre was just sitting there and so. I guess if my warre dies and I get a swarm before wax moth and stuff get the small amount of comb, I will probly re-fill it but like you say, it is harder to work with when you have all langs and even if you had all warres, It is harder to fix problims by moving around resources. They are pretty and if you just don't care about looking inside and just get what you get, I still kinda like the ideal.
Its fun.
Again, your hive looked good and it is a shame but I bet the honey is nice and to me crush and strain is easier then extracting.
Cheers
gww
Ps At least you got honey, if mine dies, all I will get is sugar water this year.


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## JConnolly

Thangs for the feedback guys.

Yeah, I did consider mite collapse. The Warre doesn't fit my OA vaporizer and I never did get an adapter built. (another of the compatibility problems). My fault for letting summer fun get in the way too much this year - missed a critical re-queening of another hive as a result, but fun is important too I guess.


The bottom board of the Warre was really quite clean, I looked for mites and only saw a few. I haven't pulled frames from the lowest box (where the brood was) yet but I'll take a good look and inspect a few of the brood cells as well. 

I checked the boards under the Lang screens in my other hives yesterday and although I did see some mites, there weren't a lot. I've still got some Apivar strips and I'm planning on putting them in my Langs today (it'll be 65 this afternoon) just to make sure. I know that means extracting the strips in mid January, but better than loosing another.

On a side note, I've let the first of the Warre boxes strain overnight. It took quite a while for the combs to come up to room temperature. Holy cow! Those Warre boxes hold a lot of honey for their small size! One box half filled my five gallon strainer, and it is still straining. I did not expect to get that much from one box. Its kind of gratifying to see so much honey from a small box.


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## JConnolly

Update:

It looks like my Warre is back in use. I caught my second swarm in as many days (this one came from one of my own hives. And now I'm out of Langstroth gear, so it went into the Warre. Hopefully I got the queen, because giving them a frame of eggs isn't going to be so easy.


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## gww

JC
Msl posted a really neat picture of how he just took a peice of comb with the right age larva and stuck it on a schiskabob type stick and put it down between the top bars for the bees to build queen cells on. I bet you have a queen though. My warre finally died end of winter. It was my only hive that did not build up durring summer or make it till spring. I let the other hives rob it of the tiny bit of stores it had left and put some lemon grass oil in it and I will see how my season goes on whether I fill it again.
Good luck
gww


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## msl

JConnolly said:


> Hopefully I got the queen, because giving them a frame of eggs isn't going to be so easy.


Easy peizy if you have wax foundation, and if you don't stick a foundatless frame in a booming lang for a few days
start with the cut strip method
http://beesource.com/resources/elem...queen-cells-without-grafting-cut-cell-method/
then build a eek/shim and put the bar up on spacers JLS style








full detales herehttp://www.beeculture.com/net-gain-cell-building-system/

You could just pull out a comb form the warre and zip tie it in to an empty lang frame places in the center of the nest... or cut off the comb and wax the cut strip of eggs to the warre top bar
plenty of options



> The Warre doesn't fit my OA vaporizer and I never did get an adapter built. (another of the compatibility problems)


ODA would be a good solution.


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## JConnolly

D'oh. :doh:

MSL, GWW, thanks for posting. 

All I was thinking of in the excitement of the moment was how I was going to transfer a Langstroth frame of eggs if I didn't get the queen. I didn't even think of moving a warre frame to a Lang to get some eggs in it if I needed to. 

I've never tried OAD, I understand its pretty rough on the bees. Since I'm back in the Warre I may need to just make sure I build something so I can OAV it. My Warre bottom board is the traditional design, so I'm going to need a shim or something or just change to a different bottom board.


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## gww

Jc
Or maby you could just make a 2 inch shim to set on the warre and vape from the top?
Cheers
gww


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## msl

You warre has frames! so much easier then lol


> I've never tried OAD, I understand its pretty rough on the bees


Marketing, there are places in the world were it is used 8x a year in commercial yards
the much sited study a says in the abstract 


> All three methods could give high varroa mortality, c. 93–95%, using 2.25 g OA per colony. However, sublimation was superior as it gave higher mortality at lower doses (.56 or 1.125 g per colony: trickling 20, 57% mortality; spraying 25, 86%; sublimation 81, 97%.). Sublimation using 2.25 g of OA also resulted in 3 and 12 times less worker bee mortality in the 10 days after application than either trickling or spraying, respectively


https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00218839.2015.1106777

3x bee mortality sounds realty bad for OAD, but when your read the study past the abstract(witch many didn't) you see OAV killed 9 bees over 10 days and OAD killed 24 bees and the study says


> Across all doses, sublimation gave mortality rates of .8–1.8 bees per day, similar to the control. Trickling at all three doses and spraying at the two lowest doses also gave rates similar to the control


now if you start running a course of treatments you might have issues, but as a treatment a few times a year OAD is no problem and is the more common treatment in other parts of the world 
but if OAV is your goto, for sure make a new bottom board


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## 1102009

msl,
what´s the white covering I see on your pict?
Is it mold?


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## 1102009

I ask, because Torben Schiffer of the Tautz Group University of Würzburg has shown us pictures of the intestines of the bees, if they have removed mold and have taken up the pathogens with their mouthparts, the intestines are changed (perhaps that is why Nosema occurs so often despite cleansing flights)
The Tautz Group has also found that bees do not use condensation in the hive because it is demineralized. They always fly to the outside.


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## msl

That's BS member JSL's aka Joe Latshaw pict taken from the linked article he wrote for BC, you are seeing the edge of a poly nuc were it wasn't painted.


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## 1102009

mmh, looks like mold to me but if you say so.


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## viesest

msl said:


> as a treatment a few times a year OAD is no problem


Winter bees should not be exposed to more than one or two OAD treatments. IMHO for intensive/extensive fall/winter treatment only OAV is good, but for summer treatment maybe OAD is better then OAV.


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## JConnolly

Blow up the picture, you can see the little expanded polystyrene balls that polystyrene foam is made of.


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## JConnolly

Thirteen day update on the swarm I put in the Warre.

The girls got right to work. They've drawn out 3/4 of both the top and bottom box.

My concerns about the queen were unfounded, there were four frames of brood in the top box. I didn't lift frames from the bottom box, just lifted it off the bottom board and peeked at the bottom side.


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## gww

Jc......
Did you ditch all the drawn comb that the origional hive built? Looking good.
Cheers
gww


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## JConnolly

Yes, I had cut it out when the former colony collapsed. The former colony had two boxes of honey which I harvested, and the lower box had brood with a honey dome. I cut out the brood and harvested the honey dome.


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## gww

Jc.... 
Got it, looking really good then. Just shows how really slow the one I had was building up. Lost it over winter.
Cheers
gww


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## Jlockhart29

Just did a 21 day on my package. I had a die out this winter and had everything for this hive; drawn comb, capped honey, pollen. I'm running Carnies and she is exploding. Out side two frames in top box are now capped honey and the remainder capped brood. She was down in the 2nd box I added half open frames last week laying eggs and capped brood there as well. The girls had pulled most of the open frames so added a third box checkerboard empty and pulled frames. Add the 3ed box sooner than I wanted but being a Carnie hive got to give those gals something to do. Running robber screen and low temps only in the low 60 so with all that capped hatching soon they should be fine.


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## JConnolly

Update on how my second round with a Warre is doing.

The colony is now in four boxes. I was hoping I wouldn't need a fourth box since I originally only built three boxes when I started this experiment. This colony had other ideas.

Here's some pictures.


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## JConnolly

I want to get out of the Warre just because it isn't compatible with my Langstroth gear. It started as a curiosity experiment. Curiosity satisfied. I think the Warre is a fine hive, but Langstroths are the standard. 

I'm thinking ahead on how I might vacate the Warre. This is a really good queen and these bees are incredibly gentle. My thoughts are to winter this colony in three boxes. If it survives then in the spring I'll make a shook swarm into a Langstroth hive on new foundation. I'll take the brood topbar/frames and zip tie them inside an empty Langstroth frame. I tried it already and they just barely fit. Then I'll put one each in a Barnyard Bees style mini-mating nuc with some bees and let them raise queens. I'll harvest any left over honey and render the wax. I'm open to other suggestions on how to discontinue the Warre.


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## msl

A miny mating nuc makes a poor cell builder. 
I would fly back spit in to the lang, and then once the cells are capped break in to the minys.

another thought would be to make a adapter(pice of ply the size of a lang migratory cover with a warre sized hole in the middle) to put the warre on top of a lang over an excluder and let all the brood hatch out


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## JConnolly

Good point. Getting a head of myself here. I think instead of a flyback split I'll make up a cell starter (I've already a screened in nuc for cell starters) and then a cell builder, but I can still use the Warre brood zip tied into an empty Langstrogth deep frame.


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