🐝 Day 29: Special Projects, Strategic Swaps, and Expanding the Yard
Apiary management is all about reading the room—or in our case, reading the hive! Over the past few weeks, we’ve been making strategic moves across the yard: rewarding high-performing colonies with ambitious tasks, easing the burden on struggling hives, and giving our booming stacks all the space they need to build. Here is the complete rundown of our latest hive shuffle and the incredible results we’ve seen!
Amanda Lea Collins
7/22/20262 min read
🛡️ Checking in on The Vanguard & Queen Freyja
Starting back on June 22nd, we paid a visit to The Vanguard. Queen Freyja’s crew has been on absolute fire lately! The population was soaring and the brood nest was packed to the brim, so we officially crowned their stack with a brand-new honey super.
Giving Freyja’s booming army immediate vertical space gives them a fresh canvas for nectar storage and keeps their momentum rolling without crowding the brood chamber.
👑 The Ranch to The Bastion: Commissioning the "Special Projects Team"
On June 23rd, we executed a major tactical frame swap. Over at The Ranch, the colony had been dragging its feet on building out a set of deep frames while sitting in limbo waiting for their new queen to hatch and emerge.
Rather than letting those deeps sit ignored, we pulled them out of The Ranch and transferred them directly into The Bastion. We officially designated The Bastion as our yard's "Special Projects Team"—and boy, did they deliver!
When we checked in on them a few days later, we were blown away. The Bastion took right to those rough, uneven Ranch deeps, acting like master architects to smooth out the wonky wax, fill in the gaps, and draw pristine, textbook comb. They are hands-down one of our most astonishing, powerhouse hives this season!
🏰 The Vault & The Haven: Beating the Space Squeeze
As the nectar flow picked up, both The Vault and The Haven made it loud and clear that they were running out of room:
The Vault: We noticed the bees were starting to build heavy ladder comb and messy burr comb between their existing honey supers—a classic cry for vertical space! To relieve the squeeze, we cleaned up the bridge comb and bottom-supered a fresh 3rd honey super directly above the queen excluder. This gave the field foragers immediate space to dump fresh nectar right off the brood nest.
The Haven: Things were looking equally bursting at the seams over at The Haven. Even though their bottom super wasn't completely capped and ready to pull, the box was so densely packed with bees that we popped down an extra honey super to keep them busy and prevent any swarm impulses.
🔄 The Citadel Frame Swap: Pushing the Limits of Comb Honey
Not all hives move at the same speed, and that’s okay! Over at The Citadel, the bees were really struggling to draw out our foundationless cassette frames (intended for beautiful round comb honey). The project was clearly just too daunting for them, and progress had stalled out.
So, we called in our all-stars once again!
We pulled the tricky foundationless frames from The Citadel and handed them over to The Bastion's special projects team.
In exchange, we took drawn/foundation frames from The Bastion and moved them into The Citadel.
The swap worked like a charm! The Citadel instantly took to the drawn foundation frames to focus on standard honey super production without the stress of building from scratch. Meanwhile, The Bastion jumped on those foundationless cassette frames with absolute precision, drawing out snow-white, pristine circular comb in no time flat!