The Gnome Mark II Hive:
After using the UTOB hive design for a few months, I have discovered that the chamber designed for honey and pollen storage is too deep and the bees have started building brood comb in it. Unfortunately this defeats the purpose of having a separate honey chamber to make honey collection easy and not (less, at least) disruptive to the bees. This is a photo of the auxiliary brood in the honey “super:”
I have decided to tackle this problem by making the hive slightly different; instead of the honey chamber being 2 3/4 inches deep, I have changed it to 1 1/4 inches deep instead. This should (hopefully) be deep enough to allow the production of one layer of honey pots but not deep enough to allow the bees to make brood.
So, I am going from this:
To this design with the reduced honey chamber:
Apart from the honey chamber, the rest of the hive is unchanged.