How To Change Brood Boxes Using A Conversion Board
Do you want to discover how to change from one hive style to another? This blog post will detail the full process on how to achieve this from start to finish.
Whatever your reason for changing brood box type, the process is the same. Some formats of hive are compatible i.e. commercial to national, national to 14 x 12. By this I mean that the footprint of the brood box is the same. If this is the case, then making the change will not be that difficult. In short just double brood the colony, placing the new box above and insert the queen excluder in the middle once both boxes are full (be sure the queen is on the right side!). Also, make sure that there is still the correct bee space between the adjacent frames.
I was making the change from commercial to Langstroth. The principle is the same for any swap. The conversion board will need to cover the whole top of your current brood box and the whole bottom of the new size brood box. The hole you then cut in the middle can be as large as you can make it, ensuring that there will be a seal on both boxes.
I used a piece of 9 mm ply wood that I had to make my conversion board. This isn’t going to last for ever but I’m sure I will get a couple of rounds out of it. Place your current brood box on the piece of wood and draw round the inside. Place the new brood box over the top of those lines and draw around the inside. This will show you the maximum cut out you can do. The other positive from the 9 mm ply is that it is as close as I could get to 1 bee space without having to make anything specific.
Step 1 - Set Up
The process itself is simple enough, remove your roof and crown board and place your conversion board onto the top of the original brood box. Then place your new brood box on top. At this point all that you need to check is that there is a good seal around the top of your old brood box and the bottom of the new. When I was doing this change I did not have any drawn frames on my new size so the new box was all foundation and the bees did just fine.
Due to the weather this year I did give the bees a small feed to help them along, not a lot just a little every couple of days, I didn’t want them trying to store the syrup!
Step 2 - Expansion
This is the very easy part! Just continue with your normal seven day inspections. Before you can go any further with the process you will need the bees to have drawn out a few frames in the new brood box and for the queen to have started to lay in the new frames. If you leave it too long though you will run the risk of them starting to store honey in the frames.
Step 3 - Swap Boxes
With your queen now laying in the new brood box, it is time to swap the two boxes around. What you must ensure is that the queen is in the correct box. When I did my change, I was lucky to find her in the top box both times. This made the process simple, lift the top box off and place it onto the correct (new) floor. Then lift the remaining old hive off the stand and place it to one side. Place the new floor and brood box onto the stand so the hive remains in the correct place.
Step 4 - Trap Queen
A quick check at this point to make sure the queen is in the bottom box is worth doing adding a queen excluder to keep the queen in the new box. You will then need to place the conversion board back on and add the original brood box on top.
Step 5 - Emerging Brood
All that you need to do now is to decide how long you will intend to leave the old brood box in place. I left mine on the hive for some time allowing all the bees to emerge. The down side is they started to store honey in the box.
For me this was not an issue due to the fact that this was a split and only 3 frames had been in contact with a miticide. These frames I will not extract and store for future splits.
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