Here is something new and yet not-so new… Roland Reed has combined the width of a Top Bar with the standardisation of langstroth to create his new hive. You could easily run a couple of Flow Supers on top of this and with a minor tweak why not have 2 or 3 queens with the workers sharing the supers. I have seen this done on Manuka hives near Byron Bay. Got to love the way beekeepers keep messing with stuff.
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Thanks @Rodderick I loke that concept.
@DextersShed - you could always do a dummy Super (super box but with a sealed/Crown board and use the normal rooves.
I know someone with an Omelet and it comes with modules that can be close off for similar reasons
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I like the idea of this…far better than lifting brood boxes. I wonder if I could glue 2 poly Langstroths together?..that would be fab…lightweight and lots of insulation for the winter. Could use celotex for the roof and stick it to some conservatory roofing…and glue 2 floors together. Hmmm…another winter project. I can see my BeeBarn will have its uses this winter.
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Just modify the roof so that it has a slight pitch away from the split and then fabricate a small 6" wide piece that would cover the seam. Seems like a pretty simple modification to keep the two supers more or less water tight. Think of it like how they do the top seam on a shingle roof, there is a top cap that seals the seam.
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I keep reading about different beekeepers and authors talking about multiple queen hives. How do you actually achieve this peacefully? If one side of the hive swarms will that side create a new queen or will they assimilate into the other hive and the second queen will pick up the slack?
I’m not sure how this works either. I have heard of people with a long hive have 3 colonies in it…but does that mean they have separate supers…or do you use queen excluders…to keep the queens in each partition…but the bees are related so don’t fight. If you split the main colony…and 2 of the splits made their own queens…the bees would all be sisters and have the same hive smell…just different queens. They would be able to pass from hive to hive and fill the supers by sharing…would there be an advantage in this system? I don’t know. Having 3 colonies would produce a lot of bees though…so potentially lots of honey.
Yo Dex ,
This is the Captain Here , I like your posts (ilyp) SOB video top bar variant has good applications . I like the multi-Queen approach for large hive -large bee colonies, but the judge is out an long term behavioural change to pheromone sharing within the hives . On good authority I have been told in China, they can load up to 9 x queens in the one colony . Apparently they remove the front mandabills from the queens and they can not grip each other to deliver the fatal sting during their fights . After a battle , they resume their duties and co-exist producing massive brood and hive size .?
@David_Smith That sounds as bad a pinching eyes from Prawns to make them bigger!! Not nice
With a divider board you should be able to run 2 or 3 queens without too much issue, just remember this is how queen producers work with their mating nucs, I have seen some langstroths with 4 queens being raised in each one, the divider boards keep them separated. Not sure about the queen pheromone mixing, maybe an experienced queen breeder can answer this.
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I read on another forum about bee breeders doing this. They stack the colonies on top of each other with a crown board between which has a square of Queen Excluder in it. Only one entrance at the bottom for all the workers to enter…so some of them have to climb through to the top colony. Apparently, the bottom brood box is raised above the others on rotation so it each benefits from the warmth generated from below. Interesting.
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I built something similar using plans found at www.horizontalhive.com
Not sure why the guy in the video thinks his hive is patented?
But due to the fixed size, we only keep one queen in the hive. I can’t see why there is any need to keep two colonies in one hive.
There is good discussion on horizontal langstroth here
http://forum.honeyflow.com/t/vertical-queen-excluders-langstroth-deep-frame/8178
There are use cases for running multiple colonies / hives in the same boxes and a horizontal langstroth makes this more straightforward than traditional langstroth.
Four queens in one langstroth!? How about eight! 