You know things aren’t going well when you have to pause your beekeeping to run into the house for rubber bands. I don’t use them often enough to include them as a regular part of my beekeeping kit, but they do come in handy sometimes.

On the day of discovering the unexpected swarm, I used all of the spare brood frames I could lay hands on to make up new brood boxes for Queen Elizabeth’s bees. And I was a few short, so the hive that Queen Elizabeth and her retinue walked into only contained about five empty frames, which hung centrally in the otherwise empty box.

What the swarm was supposed to do was start building comb in those frames. What it actually did was build combs hanging down from the crownboard into the void behind the frames, at the back of the hive.

When I went to open the hive, I immediately felt the ominous weight of the crownboard. My heart sank. My fears were confirmed when I lifted up the crownboard. There were heavy combs hanging down from it, covered in bees. They had lost no time in comb-building, in the “wrong” place.

The invention of the moveable frame hive revolutionised beekeeping, by allowing the beekeeper to lift and replace individual combs. Beekeeping without moveable frames is a messy (well, messier) and destructive business.

There’s not much you can do when you are holding a wooden board with combs of bees hanging down from it. You can’t even put it down easily. The combs have to stay vertical, or they will tear off under their own weight. If you put the board down on the combs, the combs will break. If you turn it sideways so that the combs lean, the combs will break. So I put it down as a lid on an adjacent empty box.

Within the brood box, the bees had also built some comb in a couple of the frames, albeit in irregular shape. I lifted one out and found Queen Elizabeth was fortunately there. Knowing that she was safe on a frame in the brood box, I could then operate on the free comb without fear of losing or injuring her. So I went into the house for rubber bands…

I do routinely carry a sharp knife in my beekeeping kit, for times like this.

With the crownboard laid upside down, I cut the combs free. Freshly built comb is warm, soft and white, and impossible to handle without damage. But I managed to transfer most of the largest comb to an empty frame, securing it in place by sliding the rubber bands along.

This will have set the bees back a bit. They will need to make repairs, and redraw the comb that I didn’t manage to save.

And I will need to return to the box another time to cut away the irregular combs that remain, to make it a fully moveable frame hive.

For now, however, I am mainly thankful that Queen Elizabeth is still safely in my apiary.

Rubber band beekeeping