I use full-depth, otherwise known as Langstroth, brood boxes so the queen has maximum space in which to lay eggs. After determining your colony needs a honey super, place the shallower new box, complete with waxed frames, above the brood box and replace the hive mat if using and lid. If you have frames with drawn comb that is clean and in good condition, use those in the honey super to speed up honey storage. I place a queen excluder between the brood box, or boxes and the honey super to prevent the queen from entering the honey super and laying eggs.
Many beekeepers like to add a second brood box before the honey super to ensure their colony is strong and the queen has plenty of room to lay eggs. Adding a second brood box may help deter the hive from swarming, but this is not guaranteed. Depending on where you live, the weather and the availability of suitable flora can help determine if two brood boxes are necessary.
Using two brood boxes gives the queen plenty of room to lay eggs, but it may be difficult to locate her, particularly if she is unmarked. This can help you decide if one brood box or two is best for your colony. There are no hard or fast rules as to when to add a brood box or honey super once the warmer weather begins. Each hive is unique and therefore must be monitored and inspected to find the right time to add a brood box or honey super.
My suggestions are intended as a general guide only. Take into account the weather patterns in your area and find out what other beekeepers in your local area do to determine what will best work for you.
Related Posts. Share via: 0 Shares. Share via. Copy Link. You might add a second brood box before summer starts. But by the time summer draws to a close, you are ready to pull out that second brood box because production is slowing. Another thing to consider are the actual conditions inside the hive.
Bees like to be cozy and warm whenever possible. As such, if you give them too much space, they have to work harder to maintain the right temperature and CO2 volume. This will slow down the production of honey accordingly. It will also slow down the growth of the hive. This is why it is better to start with a single brood box and just two or three supers stacked on top.
You can add more supers as the colony grows. If you can figure out just the right amount of space your colonies need at various points in the season, you will find managing productivity a lot easier. Excess productivity could mean a second brood box which, ultimately, results in even more bees. The question of brood boxes also cannot be adequately answered without observing your queen.
The average queen bee is just capable enough of keeping up with one brood box. So even if your colony is outgrowing the space you provided with your supers, that still may not warrant a second brood box. You have to check your original brood box and see how she is doing.
If she is not keeping up, do not add a second box. An older queen will more than likely have trouble filling two brood boxes. Younger queens will be better at keeping up. This suggests that the number of brood boxes you use may fluctuate from time to time based on the age of the queen.
If you would like to know how to locate the queen, check out my article Beekeeping Basics: How to Find the Queen. One last consideration is the schedule on which to harvest honey. Hives with single brood boxes and just three or four supers tend to fill up with honey earlier in the spring.
You can consider harvesting the honey as soon as the box fills up but leave the actual structure of the hive intact. On the other hand, you might not have time to harvest the honey right away. Now you are looking at adding extra supers to give your bees more space. That is when you also have to consider a second brood box. Again, consider all of the other things you have read thus far. They will all play a role in deciding whether or not a second brood box is appropriate.
Hopefully, there are others who have more experience than you do. They can help you figure out a good arrangement for your brood boxes and supers. If there are no other local beekeepers you can consult, branch out to your general region. You are ideally looking for an experienced beekeeper who works in an environment similar to yours. The closer to home that person is, the more valuable their insight will be for your operation.
Just remember that there is no hard-and-fast way to determine brood boxes and supers. Everything from climate to food sources affects beekeeping. A lot of times, what you learn about your bees is through trial and error. So maybe you get the number of brood boxes wrong the first season or two.
You will figure it out with enough practice. As mentioned above, the brood box is where all the main action of the beehive takes place. It is where the queen lives and lays her eggs. And by now you know that at some stage, every beekeeper will face the question of whether to add a second brood box or not. And you also know by reading this article up to here that the answer is not clear cut.
The size of the brood box is determined by the number of eggs that the queen lays across a day cycle. This provides the beekeeper with a fundamental tool to move frames of sealed brood to weaker brood to boost bee populations and often reducing the swarming pressure in the donor hive. If a queen lays an average of eggs per day, the production of 1. This equalization of bee populations between colonies in an apiary is a standard method of boosting production of all colonies in an apiary.
The use of these same bees to make increase nucleus colonies, aka splits and nucs, is a fundamental method beekeepers use to make up colony losses, as well as methods of producing bees for sale to local beekeepers, bypassing the need to purchase package bees.
This is the key to a sustainable approach to beekeeping—maintaining and increasing colony numbers within the apiary. Colony reproduction through swarming The second part of this colony number story is the profound swarming behavior of bee colonies. Steve has been looking at the entire swarming event.
Steve is a swarm catcher. He does cut-outs and promotes swarm capture among new beekeepers. In Nature swarms issue from most colonies starting their second year. Following the early spring buildup, a combination of factors combine to stimulate swarming in healthy bee colonies. Colonies produce multiple queen cells prior to this, and drone brood prior to swarming, in a complicated serial progression ending up with daughter colonies living in nearby nest sites.
What has come out of this book project for me has been the realization that colonies are tremendous risk takers. They put enormous resources into the bees and honey that leave with the prime swarm, along with the mother queen, and then multiple secondary swarms containing one or more virgin daughter queens. The risks are great for the parent hive—will there be enough bees left in adult bees and emerging brood to produce a crop of honey so it can survive the winter?
Also, will a daughter virgin queen be successful — to mate and return to the hive without being eaten by birds, dragonflies and other predators? Or will the colony be weakened too much that it will fall prey to robbing by other bee colonies and wasps?
And, if the old queen left with the prime swarm, will her replacement daughter be successful in her production and mating? Bee colonies are tremendous risk takers. Humans help bee colonies by providing food, space, comb, and intensive management such as by making increase nucleus hives to reduce bee population pressures.
All beekeepers should keep a minimum of two colonies throughout the season as a means of pulling bees, brood, honey, and pollen—whatever is needed—from one hive to place it into another to keep the second colony alive. All beekeepers should keep one or more nucleus colonies year-round as a means to increasing survival percentages and providing the bees the ecosystem needs for pollination, while at the same time ensuring the beekeeper with honey and other hive products for personal use and for the marketplace.
Active beekeeper participation is good for the bee colonies as well as the beekeeper. It is a wonderful synergistic relationship that has worked for centuries. If you missed the not-so-obvious plugs for Wicwas Press titles, plus one for Harvard University Press, check out the newly revised and continuously revised website www.
The same week.
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