Middle-aged worker bees like to build comb. After their young life of cleaning their room, cleaning the hive, and otherwise keeping the colony neat and tidy, they produce fresh wax underneath their abdomen when they are around 10 to 20 days old. After this period wax production wanes and the worker moves on to food storage, guard duty, air control (fanning), and eventually on to foraging.
Typically the bees will find a nice frame and start creating wax. In a top bar hive they build from the top down, filling the empty space with perfectly made hexagons like magic. With foundation on a Langstroth frame, they can build comb anywhere since the foundation provides a template. It is much more poetic on a top bar frame, if I may say so.
Of course, sometimes they put comb where it doesn’t belong. The bees done mind, they can make brood and store nectar anywhere. The beekeeper minds. I often use a small shim above a queen excluder to provide an upper entrance for the hive. You can see them in both of the below hives. The foragers have an easier path in and out of the honey supers without having to pass through the queen excluder.
Typically I have no problems with this. There is plenty of nectar and the bees make comb (and honey!) in the frames where I want it. The hive on the left in the above photo had other ideas. Below are pictures showing how they created some extraneous comb, called burr comb, in the space between the queen excluder and the above frames. Lots of nice honey too.
Quite the shame, as I’d much rather have this honey in the frames where the bees can eat it and I can harvest it. In this case, I scraped the comb off and moved the shim up one level, with the result shown in the first photo where the shim is between two boxes rather than between the excluder and the above box.
I just checked the ladies today and they had started some new comb in the shim, despite the new location. So I removed it completely and the bees will have to make their way to the honey super the hard way (through the queen excluder).
May you prosper and find honey.
Bees with eeb 
We have found that they can be quite stubborn about rebuilding inconvenient comb. Leftover traces of wax providing a hint that the beekeeper can not perceive?
Our most frustrating was when comb on adjacent sheets was not drawn out uniformly and two thin areas faced each other. They could have just thickened each but decided instead to turn 90 degress and bridge the gap. What a mess to excise. And they were insistent on rebuilding that way. We eventually just pulled both combs.
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Yeah, that’s a good point. I’ll have to keep this in mind next time around. Two other hives have a shim and they haven’t had any issues. Thanks.
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