What to do with the untidy hive?

[Nakedapiarist]

Hive 1 is causing me some headaches. It's got one deep and three supers at the moment, all was progressing well but thanks to the bad weather we've had on and off the bees started uncapping comb, then using the empty cells to store again - I now have three supers with a mixture of capped and uncapped honey in the frames.

Should I leave them to it - feed up and let them take syrup down into the vacant cells or interfere to make things tider for the spring? Excluder's on at the moment but obviously I'll be taking it off for the winter.

The bees have little store to speak of on their deeps - they've never stored much down there - so definitely need something.

 

[enrico]

Go with a super full of empty frames. Take out all the capped ones brushing the bees off, replace the empty frames on the outside of the super box pushing the other frames together to fill the spaces. You will probably end up with a box of capped frames to extract. If you want you can sort through the rest, swapping frames until you leave the bees with the frames with nectar in, I pop that under the bb in autumn and remove in spring. I put escapes on the other empty box's and take them off for storage
E

 

[Nakedapiarist]

The problem is all the frames have a mixture of capped and uncapped honey in them, they're still bringing in so there's potential for them to finish a few off but the nights are drawing in...

 

[jenkinsbrynmair]

plenty of time it's not even September yet

 

[dexter's shed]

The problem is all the frames have a mixture of capped and uncapped honey in them.

do as enrico has said, do the shake test of each frame, putting all those that pass into one super and so on

 

[Swarm]

plenty of time it's not even September yet

I'm with him, if you have Balsam nearby they could be foraging well into September.