Ask 10 beekeepers a question…
There’s a saying in the beekeeping world: Ask 10 beekeepers a question and you will get at least 11 different answers…let me add to that and say: Post a simple question in an online beekeeping forum and you will get as many different answers as responses, AND start an argument over global warming, overuse of plastics in our throw-away-society, and rainforest deforestation! It’s amazing how a thread can be hijacked so quickly lol.
In the end, I did get some good feedback to my question, but I had to wade through almost 90 posts, most of which were just like, “Oh ya? Well YOU’RE stupid!” “No YOU are!” and such witty banter. It wasn’t even about MY question! (Which was about why my bees are building drunken looking burr comb in the second brood box)
The answer to this may be overfeeding. I had read that if bees are needing to draw out new foundation, they should be fed because it takes a lot of energy to make wax. However, they were socking away the sugar syrup, storing it in the burr comb in such quantities that they probably didn’t give a crap about how neat and organized their comb was. So we decided to remove the feeder from Hive 2 and monitor their progress. We also checkerboarded in some drawn frames with undrawn natural wax foundation to see if for some reason they have just decided they do not like to work plastic foundation. We’ll see how it goes!
E