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  1. Shane hunter
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    Well I thought using 3 deeps was a good idea without a queen exculder. I thought I was going to just get honey in the upper deep and queen would stay in the lower 2. Yeah was I wrong. Had queen laying in all 3 boxes had to manipulate all the frames to go into a 2 deep brood box setup for winter. Never doing that again.

  2. Alan Woods
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    The purpose of using three deep boxes is the same as using two deeps and a super. You must pull the third box, spin the honey, or store the frames for winter. If the queen is laying in the top deep after the wax is drawn out, move her to a lower box, and add a queen excluder. The bees will hatch out of the frames and fill the cells with honey. This was a mistake that I learned the hard way as well. But, like a hammer, a queen excluder is a great tool if you have to use it.

  3. Russell and Maria
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    I test for Varroa, results were negative, did not gave a treatment.
    Was that a good decision?
    How prevalent this mites are around Chehalis arears?

    • Alan Woods
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      Yes, mites are prevalent in this area, however it is too late to second guess yourself. Making decisions is one of the things that a beekeeper must learn to live with. While all decisions may not be good ones, you can definitely learn from them. Let us know the outcome in the spring.

  4. Janice Olson
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    2 hives this year; however, one was nasty so I didn’t give them an extra deep. They seem to be calm now, hopefully they stay that way and I get some honey from them next year.

    • Alan Woods
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      I am sorry to hear that the bees were nasty, but the crazy thing is, nasty bees normally produce a larger amount of honey. However, I completely understand not having to work with HOT bees. If this happens again remove the queen and after four days check the frames for queen cells. Remove any queen cell that you find and add a new caged queen and after 50 days all the bees in the hive will be from the new queen. The reason you don’t want the bees to replace the queen themselves is that the new queen will have the same genetics as the old queen and could be just as nasty.