# adding new hives and moving hives



## sleeps723 (Sep 10, 2006)

first this is my first year with my bees. and i hope i`ve been doing alright.

i got my first 2 hives in march/april. they were originaly just the hive super, i have since added another hive super to each and one med hive super to each. one hive was doing great and the other not so good but alright. i took a frame of brood from my strong hive and put it in my weaker hive, it seems to helped quite a bit.

i had my hives on huge 2 foot creasote square logs, well gophers have been mining alot and one was tipping pretty bad. so i built a 12 foot floor that would hold like 6 hives and set it on 6 cinder blocks. in order to do all this i had to dismantle each hive in sections and set aside to set up the new foundation.


i was halfway done with this when it started to pour rain. i found lots of dead bees and now im worried about my queens. also the bottom hive super was relatively light, maybe 50 lbs on both hives, and the second hive super on the strong hive was extremely heavy. im pretty good sized guy and it was a strain for me. and the weaker hives hive super was only maybe a 100 lbs.

they were pretty upset, i could feel them hitting me pretty hard. well i got everything set up and put together and about that time it quit raining.  

i got 2 more hives this weekend thats started pretty good and i added them to my original two. their boxes are in bad shape and they have plastic frames so im wanting to get new boxes and frames and move the hives to the better boxes. i will lose my comb but dont know what else to do.

any suggestions ?


----------



## alleyyooper (Apr 22, 2005)

"i got 2 more hives this weekend thats started pretty good and i added them to my original two. their boxes are in bad shape and they have plastic frames so im wanting to get new boxes and frames and move the hives to the better boxes. i will lose my comb but dont know what else to do."

Set the new boxes on top of the old stuff and allow the girls to move up into the new stuff. Once the queen is in the new stuff place a queen excluder between the new and old so the girls will bring the stuff from below to the top.

 Al


----------



## dcross (Aug 12, 2005)

sleeps723 said:


> also the bottom hive super was relatively light, maybe 50 lbs on both hives, and the second hive super on the strong hive was extremely heavy. im pretty good sized guy and it was a strain for me. and the weaker hives hive super was only maybe a 100 lbs.
> 
> their boxes are in bad shape and they have plastic frames so im wanting to get new boxes and frames and move the hives to the better boxes. i will lose my comb but dont know what else to do.
> 
> any suggestions ?


The reason that bottom box was lighter might have been because it was full of brood, which is much lighter than honey.

I would just put the plastic frames into a nicer box


----------

