Ay yi yi!! So I finally went spelunking into the bee boxes to figure out what the heck was going on with them, and made some unfortunate discoveries.
1. The New Bee-ans had cross-combed EVERYWHERE. The shallow super I plonked on them was just a morass of weird comb, luckily not too heavily loaded with nectar, but for some reason they decided to build up instead of down. I only managed to save a sum total of about 2 frames’ worth of comb. Everything else was beyond rescue.
2. The Golden Horde had backfilled literally every piece of comb in the hive and was white-waxing the roof. There were FOUR queen peanuts about to hatch.
3. Stingapore had filled every bit of comb as well... but refused to draw another comb for whatever reason.
As you can imagine, I spent a solid hour sorting out this morass.
1. New Bee-ans got a medium super of drawn comb to replace all the scrapped comb, and got to keep the shallow to see if they can fix their mess now that the combs are straightened.
2. The Golden Horde got split into a 10-frame deep I’ve named the Philistings (5 brood from the Horde + 5 drawn brood combs + 2 queen peanuts), and I replaced the brood frames I pulled with drawn brood comb. They also got a third medium deep of drawn comb, since the flow’s still on.
3. Stingapore received a reward for their comb-laziness in the form of a 5-frame medium super with partially drawn comb, to give the queen somewhere to lay.
Here’s hoping the crew manages to finish out the spring flow strong!