Second Brood Chamber Added to the Hive

A few weeks ago Jessica and I finally made the decision to add a second brood chamber to our (her) beehive. We'd been thinking about it for a while and weren't really sure what to do. On the one hand, we thought that the bees could more easily keep a single chamber hive warm. A second brood chamber would just add a lot of dead space above the brood nest that they would need to keep warm, and were we still in January, so the weather could still get really cold. On the other hand, the hive was JAM PACKED with bees . So much so that if the telescoping lid was removed, the top of the inner cover was almost completely covered in bees. We were worried that they needed space to expand.

Eventually our cramped bees worries overcame our cold bees worries and the decision was made to add a second chamber. We waited for a reasonably warm day (62 deg. F) and went for it. The plan was just to move a frame of honey from the bottom chamber and put it in the top chamber, directly over the center of the brood nest, and put an empty frame in its place. It was difficult to get the bees out of the way to do all of this - there were just so may bees. The frame that we relocated was loaded with honey, which was great to see - at least our bees weren't starving - but would they be able to get to the honey frame when it was in the top chamber? After fighting to get the job done, we were glad to button the hive back up. It seemed like we killed a few bees in the whole process but we'd done it, and hopefully the bees would be happy with their new extension. When we stood back from the hive, we were surprised to see the whole of the hive entrance covered in a large mass of bees. It seemed that when we smoked the bees at the top of the hive to get them to moved down and out of the way, there was no room for them and bees down at the bottom had been pushed out!