Seeking new location for hive

Kayla—another issue that may be irritating the bees with a possibly congested brood nest, are the gardeners using string trimmers or other equipment by the hive? Is this possibly happening? A temporary screen of reed fencing, purchased by the roll at home depot and 6 ft high, can be installed directly in front of the entrance, even just 6 inches in front, forcing the flight path directly up from the hive and out of crossing with pedestrians.

Hi, Kayla—without doubt they are too crowded in one deep and since not seen for 6 weeks they could be on verge of swarming—bees are building up at a furious pace right now. A common misconception is that a empty box on top means the broodnest won’t get crowded. The queen will not move up into a second box unless a couple or three brood frames are moved up into the higher box and empties put down below. Move the brood together into the center. Yes, I know you don’t have another deep, but you must put one on or accept what will inevitably happen—swarming. One deep is just not enough space for bees to live. This operation is called “brooding up” not checkerboarding. Walt Wright of Kentucky named the checkerboarding epithet to describe the interspersing of empty and full frames in the honey storage boxes ABOVE the brood nest. So, if a full honey box is to be “checkerboarded” you need two boxes, staggering the 10 frames above and below each other with the empties and full honey frames. It is a swarm prevention measure. Ideally, you would want to move the frames with mostly drone brood, a common situation at this time, up into the higher box and when those hatch, the bees commonly fill those large cells with honey.
So, did you come to the meeting last week on the two topics I mentioned? Chip is doing quite well and should be a great contact for you. Community Gardens are a notoriously poor choice for bee locations, unfortunately, because of the problems you are noting OFTEN occur. But your bees are also crowded.

Kayla—I strongly urge you to check out Michael Bush’s website—his entire book on Natural Beekeeping is here. Particularly the swarm prevention advice, here—-“The first mistake people make about preventing swarms is they think you can just throw on some supers and they won’t swarm. But they will. Yes, it’s nice to have room for them to store the honey, so the supers are helpful, but the bees intend to swarm and the supers will not deter them from the plan to do a reproductive swarm.”
http://www.bushfarms.com/beesswarmcontrol.htm