Capped Honey Frames in Brood Box: Honeylocked Hives

What do When Your Langstorth Brood Box is Full of Honey

Start by removing the capped honey frames and replacing them with empty, drawn frames. If the weather will stay warm over the next weeks, I consider adding a honey super. Next: figure out why this happened. In my case, honeylocking occurred following flumethrin treatment for Varroa, I saw many capped frames of honey, and only a few frames with brood in the brood box. Within these brood frames, around 70% was capped honey, leaving a small center space on for Her Majesty to lay eggs.

The queen was “honeylocked”, or “honeybound”; she did not have enough room to lay eggs. If unmanaged, the colony population will shrink over time, and may become prone to robbing or collapse as a result of insufficient workers.

Managing Honeylocked Hives

The bees have run out of space to store their honey, so they add it to empty brood cells. Eventually, the frame becomes all honey, and no brood. Replacing those full frames with empty frames, or those containing foundation helps the bees draw it out and start anew. The honey in the now-removed frames can be extracted, and the frames stored away, or cut out for honeycomb¹.

Honeylocking is not the first sign of a hive needing space – oftentimes, the lids are first filled with burr comb. This joins the frames’ top bars to the hive ceiling, making it hard to open. After the burr comb was filled with honey, the bees started filling the empty brood cells.

Addition of a Super

If your Langstorth hives have a single box, the obvious fix is to add on a honey super to give the bees more storage room. In my case, I was performing flumethrin treatments during the summer (I know, I know – wrong time for this), so adding a super was not an issue. Remember to add a queen excluder between the two boxes to keep the brood and honey separate. Super depth does not matter (ideal, full, WSP etc..), so long as it matches the frame width of your brood box (eight, ten, etc..).

The deposits from returning foragers will now be placed in the added box, and the hive will slowly begin filling the super, assuming the nectar flow continues. Some beekeepers say that the bees will move capped honey from the brood frames into the super to free up room for egg laying. I have not observed this in my hives, and the internet delivers mixed messages on whether this is possible. Biologically, it is logical for the bees to move honey around in order to maximise egg laying & colony strength. Unfortunately bees are not taught logic.

Consequences of Honeybound Hives

If I had not added a brood box, then the colony population will slowly dwindle as the rate of egg laying (and hence worker population) decreases. This process takes place over months, as the average worker bee’s lifespan is 42 days. Eventually, the hive will get weak enough to be robbed by nearby colonies in the apiary, or overwhelmed by predators.

Further, a weaker hive is more susceptible to diseases, and may not be able to maintain an adequate internal temperature for brood rearing (~36ºC). Strong nectar flows that set the conditions for honeylocked hives are in the spring and summer, meaning that this gradual decline process will occur over autumn. It is unlikely these hives will survive winter.

Why Beginners Should Start With Two Hives

Beginner beekeepers are told to start with one hive and get a second one sooner after. Two hives allows the beekeeper to establish comparisons: they can see which colony is lacking and which is thriving. One colony alone may not tell easily tell you this information – after all, if the queen is still laying, why aren’t the bees making honey? Two hives will give clues as to whether it’s the weather, a disease, or something else entirely – go ahead, inspect.

Preventing Honeylocking

For the backyard beekeeper, ensure that colonies have plenty of space in the hive boxes. This could be by adding on a super, or by removing the capped honey for extraction (later returning the empty frames for the bees to clean and refill them). Honeylocking is uncommon, and could be a sign of neglected hives, or bad luck.

In my case, it was because the supers were removed to make way for Varroa treatment. After flumethrin application, I found my hives honeylocked and in serious need of space. This is the drawback with using the wrong Varroa treatment for the season. Removing the supers meant that the worker bees had nowhere to store their nectar other than the brood frames, which resulted in entire frames being filled with honey. Not to mention the loss of seasonal honey produce, as flumethrin can contaminate honey (Jamal et al., 2020)

Timing Varroa Treatment

Extracted from “Eight Weeks After Flumethrin Treatment“

I was part of the initial Australian government program for Varroa treatments. From September 2023 until end of January 2024, beekeepers who had confirmed Varroa infestations received a packet of flumethrin strips to manage the initial mite loads until commercial supplies were readily available.

Now that additional chemicals were approved (Formic acid, oxalic acid, fluvalinate, amitraz & thymol), I would have used formic acid, as my treatments were applied in summer for peak populations, and formic acid can be applied with the supers on. I also could have waited and monitored mite levels throughout the summer until Formic Pro was made available. Alas, hindsight is 20/20.

My Varroa treatment plan is outlined below, and is dependent on the mite count and season.

Why Bees Honeylock

The short answer is that when more honey is available in the hive, the colony has a greater chance of surviving and withstanding stressors. This translates to a greater chance of successful reproduction via swarming, and ensuring the post-swarm population has enough resources to survive.

In the beginning of bee history, female solitary bees stored enough honey (more accurately, “nectar & pollen”) in their cells to feed the next generation of bees. In response to environmental pressures and genetic mutations, further changes developed, such as the castes, waggle dancing and worker policing. Unlike solitary bees who prepare nests for a single season, Apis mellifera developed permanent colonies that survive year-round and across multiple generations. The colony reproduces via swarming each season, and must have sufficient resources to do so.

Colony status can be measured by the amount of stored honey in the comb. This is true in both backyard beekeeping and in natural beehives – the more stored honey in a colony, the more resilient it is. From this perspective, there is no such thing as “excessive” honey production, and it takes priority over egg laying. A single queen lays eggs. The ten thousand workers tend to the hive and themselves, ripening honey for the literal rainy days.

The Importance of Honey Production to Bees

The 2022 review by Fernandes and colleagues describe the significance of honey to bees, and how the nectar conversion process is more than “dehydration”. Throughout the ripening process, worker bees secrete enzymes into the nectar, such as:

• Invertase to convert the sucrose into fructose and glucose,
• Proteases to break down the proteins and polypeptides into smaller forms,
• Diastase to break down the larger starch and dextrin sugars into smaller carbohydrates, amongst others.

Once the honey is ripe, it is capped and used during times of poor forage. Honey is made from select flowers on the basis of the colony’s requirements: the forage will differ in a colony aiming to improve its overall health, fight off infection (immune system enhancement), respond to stress (e.g. antioxidant defence in response to pesticide ingestion) or to support its gut microbiome.

To bees, honey is a remedy for anything short of sudden death. Producing more workers is costly to the colony and has delayed payoffs, whereas producing more honey has an immediate benefit. This could be why colonies would favour being honeybound rather than leaving awaiting the queen’s egg and leaving an empty space in the brood cells.

Can Wild Colonies be Honeylocked?

This ventures into hypothetical realms, and both possibilities are plausible.

On the one hand, honeylocking is a man-made observation, specific to hives with “restricted space” like the Langstroth. In the wild, colonies can build more comb within their tree cavity to meet the nectar flows, and know their limits. If the colony becomes congested, they will swarm uninterrupted, for there is no beekeeper to constantly remove the queen cells. In the apiary, they are subject to constant manipulation of their hive volume from the seasonal modification of supers².

To consider the other possibility, a colony may indeed become honeylocked and not have time to swarm, for example due to a nectar flow late in the season. However since these bees generally nest in trees, away from observation – it goes unreported. Will his honeybound colony be subject to a dwindling population and eventual collapse, or will it consume the stored honey to make room for the eggs? Dear tree beekeepers, please let me know.

Warre Hives as a Demonstration of Natural Beehives

Perhaps the closest mimic to natural bee nesting conditions are the Warre hives. No queen excluder is used, and the colony expands downwards by undersupering (as opposed to the regular additions of supers on the top of Langstroth hives). This vertical stacking of boxes makes bees build comb downward as they do in nature. The top boxes will naturally be filled with honey, with brood located on the bottom.

The frames of Warre hives are foundationless (or use a small starter strip); the bees construct comb entirely by themselves, rather than according to the preset cell size. A quilt box is placed on top of the hives, with insulating materials like wood chips. The quilt helps in temperature and moisture regulation, reducing condensation that could harm the bees during colder months, very much mimicking a tree cavity.

Resolving Honeylocked Hives is a Matter of Replacing Frames

In the end, it’s a matter of replacing the capped honey frames with empty ones, and supering hives to give them more space. If no Varroa treatment was used, then those removed frames are a bonus honey harvest, enjoy!

Read the whole post and found puns, typos mistakes? Voice your displeasure with a strongly-worded message to admin@tgbee.com.au, or by filling this form.

Footnotes

1. Remember, cut comb from foundation will be much harder and chewier than drawn-out comb. I find that most people prefer foundationless honeycomb for its softness, but to each their own. ↩︎
2. You might be thinking “hang on Mister HolyHabibee Entomologically, but workers only live for 42 days – how will they have memories or knowledge of the hive volume manipulation? You’re right, how would they? In nature, colony congestion follows a pattern of occurring in spring and summer, which the bees evolved a response to (swarming). Sudden volume changes in winter or autumn is what’s foreign to them, likely triggering a stress response. ↩︎