I just read the latest British Bee Keeper magazine (September)- In it was an article about running a double queen hive (two brood boxes separated by an excluder) so the workers could service either hive but the queens didn’t fight. This had aparently worked for a number of years - I suppose only having one entrance protected against wasps maybee, which are at plague levels in s England this year - anyone else having wasp problems???
Nope!
Good strong hives, reduced entrances and Waspbane traps and not a single wasp is tackling the hive entrances.
1 Like
My girls are seeing them off, but I know a poor chap who lost his to wasps only this last week.
When I sand by my hives watching my girls I also play my version of “splat a rat” - Wack a wasp!
I just find one good queen per hive is fine. Especially queens that are naturally selected.
1 Like
First of all: That beekeepers frames are in a bad state of repair. With 30% of the food Americans eat depending on bee pollination, I can just see the price of pollination services going up, not to mention the price of honey also going up. This should bring more people into the beekeeping industry.
How do you mean Michael, what do the extra pheromones do for the colony?
Attaching a photo of a 12 frame two queen hive (divided to keep the queens separate) used for Manuka/Leptospermum, it feeds a 12 frame super.
I’ve heard many estimates, but Dzierzon published that he had counted and it was at least 3,000 a day during the peak of the season. If one queen can lay 3,000 eggs a day then you have 3,000 bees emerging every day. I don’t see that is any more or less than what happens in a two queen hive, but the hive seems more motivated and seems more willing to raise that many. My only guess is that it’s the pheromones that are doing the motivating. Two queen hives definitely do build up to a stronger peak, I just don’t think it’s the laying ability that is the cause.
1 Like
I had to look him up…
Polish beekeeper in late 1800s. Wiki (which I quickly abandoned) has him down as the inventor of the mobile frame ???
His "theory makes interesting reading if only to show how knowledge of the natural history of the bee has progressed.
Dzierzon invented HIS movable frame hive before Langstroth, but after Huber, so I don’t see why they credit him with the movable frame hive. However he proved, and was the first to put forth the theory, that drones were from unfertilized eggs while workers were from fertilized eggs. For which he was excommunicated, of course. He was also a Catholic priest up until then. Between Dzierzon and Huber they discovered every useful thing we know about bees. Langstroth had read both Huber and Dzierzon before inventing his hive.
I love stuff like this…some of it heavy reading but fascinating nevertheless.
A queens ability to lay that 3,000 eggs a day is only limited by how quickly the house bees can prepare the comb for her to lay in. At the rate of 3,000 eggs a day, that means a strong hive can double it’s population in a month. I can’t get my head around having 2 queens in one hive. I think 2 queens should be in 2 separate hives.
http://www.bushfarms.com/beestwoqueenhive.htm
I’ve done two queen hives by several methods. It is a fun experiment, but I think it’s more work than it’s worth. It’s easier to run three or four one queen hives than one two queen hive and those three or four will make as much honey as the one two queen hive.
I probably will continue to experiment. One of those experiments is to just divide the brood nest with an excluder and they almost always raise a queen on the side that doesn’t have one resulting in a two queen hive that can later be split or left together. That is a lot less work than most systems and if they don’t succeed it’s not a big risk, it will just be a one queen hive.
Oh I can attest to accidently raising a new queen on the other side of the queen excluder. When moving capped brood up into the super as part of spring management just recently I must have had eggs on the frame and hey presto, a capped queen cell a week later. She is now safely enjoying the confines of a Nuc a couple of metres away. I love this method, if it doesn’t workout then just re-join the bees back to the original colony.
1 Like
This topic raises another question, how many full depth supers are required for brood raising. I see a lot of people are using 2. I only use 1. When you say you like to use old combs, maybe that’s the reason lots of people need 2 boxes for brood. The old combs probably have a smaller % of brood, therefore beeks are requiring 2 boxes of old comb to do the same job as 1 box with good new comb. Maybe with the combs spread out over 2 boxes that’s the reason you need the pheromones of 2 queens in a hive. With good new comb condensed in 1 box, the pheromones of 1 queen should be sufficient. In the wild I’ve noticed the bees keep the brood condensed & not spread out over a large area.
Yes, might be a good reason why some beekeepers like to encourage the bees to create their own brood comb (no foundation) in the brood box. I can see the advantages of this now.
I used a lot foundationless frames in the past & found I’m better off with foundation. If the bees will build it nicely for you & you end up with 95% worker comb, that’s as good as you can get, I reckon. You get large concentrations of drone comb with foundationless frames & that’s not good for combating SHB. If you count the cells on one normal frame, it totals nearly 6,000. If you have say 7 good frames in the brood @ 2/3 full of brood, that means the hive will produce 28,000 bees in 3 weeks. Allow one more week for the queen to lay again, so that gives you 28,000 in a month. 56,000 in 2 months. No wonder some of the swarms are so big.
1 Like
I am using all small cell or natural cell. With small cell a deep frame has 8400 cells. With a large cell deep frame you have 7000 cells.
http://www.bushfarms.com/beesfaqs.htm#cellsonaframe
I have a considerable amount more cells per frame with small cell. I also run 9 frames in an eight frame box, which gives me one more frame.
http://www.bushfarms.com/beesframewidth.htm
I happen to run mediums, but the difference between the two (more frames and more cells) is that one eight frame box on my hives contains 49,896 cells (if it’s not plastic in which case there is a considerable amount more due to no top bar space being wasted). Where an eight frame box with eight frames and large cells contains 36,960 cells. My cells do not get smaller as they are already small and get chewed out sooner. I typically have brood in at least three boxes and in the peak of the buildup four boxes. Sometimes more. I have no excluder on so the queen can expand as much as she likes.
1 Like
This is really interesting and the first time I have read this. So do you space a couple of frames at the wider 1 3/8" toward the outside of the box to allow for some drone and honey storage and keep the rest of the box at 1 1/4" to encourage worker production? Or are you putting the whole box at 1 1/4"?
The bees can always figure out how to raise some drones. I make them all 1 1/4" in the brood nest. Honey supers are more likely 1 3/8" or 1 1/2"
Well done, it sounds good. I don’t understand the 9 frames in an 8 frame box. I’ve never heard of that before, that kind of sounds unnatural for the bees plus this is the first time I’ve heard of bees chewing them out. Maybe I’m replacing my frames well before that happens. I’m a part time commercial beekeeper, I’m chasing honey as well as good bee populations. I found what I’m doing works really well for me & also people that choose to take my advice. I had to double check, did you say you put 9 frames in an 8 frame box? It’s early in the morning, my brain’s a bit slow. How on earth do you put 9 frames in an 8 frame box without reducing the width of the frames or expanding the size of the 8 frame box?