I’m trying to plan for next year, I’d like to add a few more standard hives (Slovenian Bee house is going to take a few years!). But I’m not ready to invest in 3 more flow hives, so I’m considering using one flow hive to super 2 full hives. I’ve read about the system before with standard supers: http://www.beeculture.com/the-horizontal-two-queen-system/
but have yet to see someone do this with a flow super. It seems to me that this would lend itself well to the flowhive, as you could drain the frames as fast as they fill them up with minimal disruption to the colony.
I am curious about this idea as well. Will bees from two colonies happily enter the one super and lay down nectar side by side? Are there ever any issues with the bees fighting?
I haven’t but have thought about it. I didn’t go further when the horizontal hive version of this had teething problems. Can’t remember exactly what the problem was may be QE the wrong way or something.
Also as Bushy points out you have a lot of boxs to disturb when you want to look in say the bottom left box…especially if the bees have propolised the two stacks at the Flow hive.
I don’t think you are off the rails and would be interested in how it goes.
There are several ways to end up with two queens coexisting, but the easiest is if the bees raise the new queen. To do this just make sure you have brood in both sections and they are far enough apart that they will raise a new queen. My design of one long horizontal hive with vertical excluders dividing it into three works well for this. Just put brood in both of the ends and the end without a queen will raise one. You can also do a newspaper combine of two queenright colonies with the one in sbaillie’s picture. Making the whole thing queenless and then introducing a queen to both sides simultaneously (not the queen that was removed) also works. What does NOT work is trying to introduce another laying queen to one side of a queenright colony.
Once you have a two queen colony they are not two colonies. They are one colony.
I find two queen hives a fun experiment, but they are a lot of work, and they can get REALLY strong and for a new beekeeper that can be intimidating.
I’ve been thinking about doing this with my wee Queen Castle this spring. Once the numbers build up all three colonies have excessive bees and they hang out a lot. So, I thought I should put an excluder on and just super-up. Give those foragers something to do!
