The Great Bailey Comb Change (With a Twist!) 🔄🐝 

📝 Back to the Beginning
You may remember when we first welcomed our swarm, the bees were on National frames, but our hive was built for Langstroth frames. Thanks to some 3D-printed ingenuity, we made it work… but we always knew a more permanent solution was needed.

This month, it was finally time to fix that — with a little help from our mentor Maria at the Braintree Beekeepers Association.

📚 Whiteboards & Wisdom
With Maria’s guidance (and her trusty whiteboard sketches!), we mapped out a plan: a modified version of the classic Bailey comb change. This clever method lets you swap bees onto fresh frames of the right size without losing the brood they’re already raising.

🔧 Hive Jenga: Mixing Nationals & Langstroths
Here’s how we did it:

• Maria kindly lent us a spare National brood box, floor, and queen excluder.
  
  

• Luke built an adaptor so a Langstroth box could sit snugly on top of a National.
  
  

• He also made an “eek” (a frame extension) to serve as a new entrance for the bees.
  
  

The setup looked a bit like beekeeping Jenga: National brood at the bottom, a queen excluder above it, and then our Langstroth brood box on top, filled with fresh frames and foundation ready for the bees to draw out.

The idea?

• The existing brood in the National frames would hatch out.
  
  

• The queen, confined above the excluder, would only lay in the new Langstroth frames.
  
  

• Slowly but surely, the colony would transition into the correct hive format — no drama, no brood wasted.
  
  

🍯 A Little Help from Us
To give the bees a boost, we fed them a light syrup of 1:1 sugar and water, which mimics nectar and encourages comb building.

We also bruised the capped honey stores in the National frames (scraping them lightly) so the bees would move it upwards and clear the old comb.

💡 Did you know?
Bees need vast amounts of energy to produce wax — about 8 pounds of honey to make just 1 pound of wax. That’s why feeding and bruising stores are such handy tricks during a comb change.

✨ Success!
After a few weeks — and a few more feeds of sugar water — the Bailey comb change was complete.

The bees had drawn out fresh, neat comb on the new Langstroth frames, and were busy filling them with brood and stores. Meanwhile, the old National frames were left completely empty, ready to be removed.

A slightly unusual setup, but it worked perfectly. Now the colony is fully established in their Langstroth home, tidy and standardised — just as we hoped.

🐝 Little Beekeeper’s Notes

• Eek = a spacer or shim added to a hive, often used to make extra entrances.
  
  

• Queen excluder = a grid that allows workers through but blocks the larger queen, controlling where she can lay eggs.
  
  

• 1:1 sugar syrup = a spring feed that mimics nectar, used to stimulate wax production and comb building.
  
  

• Bruising stores = lightly damaging capped honey so bees are encouraged to move or consume it.
  
  

• Bailey comb change = a method of replacing old or mismatched comb gradually, while keeping the colony strong.
  
  

🌼 What’s Next?
With fresh comb, a strong queen, and a thriving colony, our bees are set up beautifully for the season ahead.

It was a slightly quirky Bailey comb change, but it worked — and it feels like another big milestone in our beekeeping journey with Beryl and her buzzing family. 💛🐝