This beautiful box of honeycomb is ‘welded’ to the box below…to move it, I’ve got to cut the bottom of the comb. I’d like to do it without damaging it or killing bees.
I only wanted to switch the third box (full of honeycomb) with the top box which was empty. The box of honeycomb was blocking the empty, so it made sense to swap…but the honeycomb was attached to the bars in the box below. If I just pried the box up, I might tear the combs apart leading to a real mess. I consulted the forums…Bernhard suggests cracking the boxes a bit then taking a thin wire to slice through the bottoms of the combs to lift the box out.
I wound a short length of stainless steel wire around some cut broomstick ends. I’ll see-saw it back and forth to carefully cut through comb.
After reading some of the experiences of beekeepers tearing apart combs I knew I wanted to avoid that. The whole thing actually took less time than I thought…about 5 minutes. It came apart with the minimum of damage.
I shot this video (sped up in parts to avoid the ‘yawn’ effect)
Adventures in Natural Beekeeping 
An elegant solution. I bought a cutter from backyardhive.com. But it was expensive.
Terry
I had no idea anyone sold these things…but it was easy to make.
So other people have these comb bridge problems as well. Glad it’s not just me.
The backyardhive.com tool is for use with horizontal Top Bar Hives. Yes, expensive but extremely effective and useful (the original one, not the new 90-degree one), in my experience. If you’re looking to purchase a cutter like that Pat made, just search for ‘cheese wire’ on Amazon. You can get one for just a few bucks.
The backyardhive tool is useful in a Warré hive, too, if you’re open to moving combs.
I wish I could say this was a complete success, that the bees ‘glomed’ onto the ladders and built wax during this blackberry nectar flow, but that was simply not the case. They haven’t done much at all. I’m wondering if there is a queen because I haven’t seen much build up at all, but it’s tough to inspect the Warre for eggs and larvae without tearing up the comb. Yesterday, I pulled off the honeycomb box to discourage robbing, but I want to keep it (possibly freeze it) to be able to feed back if the bees need it in winter. I’ll wait a few more days to see if the bees start building in the empty box…maybe they feel they don’t need to because they have plenty of honey stores still in the other two boxes and the nectar flow is at the end, so maybe they are ‘drawing down.’