Thoughts on Brood and Half management.

[Black Comb]

What do you use now Grizzly?

[Neils]

Now, I may be very wrong here (I've laboured under quite a few wrong ideas and misjudgements since first getting my own bees) but I have a feeling that a colony which appears to be comfortable in a single box may still actually feel restricted if they're forced to lay across the combs horizontally when infact by choice at certain times during build up they'd prefer to elongate their nest in the vertical plain. Right or wrong, that's basically where I'm coming from.

I don't disagree with you regarding preference for bees going vertically, indeed, it's one of things I like about the 14x12 over the commercial or langstroth boxes. I don't think it's entirely co-incidental that the vast majority of box hives don't go much wider than 10-12 frames horizontally and it's one of the frequent criticisms raised against KTBH and Dartington boxes for that matter, especially in our climate, that even with oodles of spare space horizontally it's quite rare to get a colony that will make use of that all that space where they will quite happily fill a much larger space vertically.

I think I'd personally not be too inclined to be pulling out frames in favour of [insulated] Dummy boards over comb as it's never seemed to bother them that much nor have any of mine ever shown much resistance to utilising the full 11 frames when in place.

[prakel]

I think I'd personally not be too inclined to be pulling out frames in favour of [insulated] Dummy boards over comb as it's never seemed to bother them that much nor have any of mine ever shown much resistance to utilising the full 11 frames when in place.

Insulated dummy? .... not quite what I'm using! But, totally agree, it seems a waste of hive space not to fill it with comb. I was probably over thinking things (in the wrong direction) when I pulled the combs but I've had all winter to rethink. As you rightly point out they'll make use of it. There's also the benefit of spare drawn comb to pull for nucs.

[prakel]

Thanks to Black Comb and Jimbo for directing me to Ian Craig's 'My Beekeeping Year' -still working my way through it but I was hooked the moment that I read that he inspects from a kneeling position. I'll come back to Mr.Craig once I've finished the article but do think that someone who knows how to link pdfs should put it in the 'favourite links' sub forum.

[drumgerry]

Ian is quite a tall chap Prakel so maybe kneeling works for him! It wouldn't for me at 5'9!

[mbc]

I have a feeling that a colony which appears to be comfortable in a single box may still actually feel restricted if they're forced to lay across the combs horizontally when infact by choice at certain times during build up they'd prefer to elongate their nest in the vertical plain. Right or wrong, that's basically where I'm coming from.

I quite often run my bees on unrestricted nests, all in national size boxes, and what tends to happen is that they will build their nest upwards, through two or even three national boxes, but the lower one where the original nest was becomes very sparsely populated. This isnt necessarily a bad thing, as it leaves the bottom box ideal for an artificial swarm to go in to as most of the brood has left the bottom box and gone upwards by the time I, or the bees, decide its time for making increase.
This idea of keeping the nest nice and neat and compact is purely for the beekeepers convenience rather than for the bees sake.

[Black Comb]

Oddly in my jumbo langstroths they never use the full vertical area of each frame.
There is always a substantial honey arc then pollen arc before the brood. I know this is normal in most boxes but the honey arc in particular is relatively large.
I've inspected many nationals at the association and they often laid up complete frames with brood.
The benefit of these large boxes is that often I only run 8 frames, 9 max as this gives approx. 72k cells which Clive de Bruyn says is ideal. V. similar to 14 x 12.

[The Drone Ranger]

when I was doing a spot of reading about the Glenn Hive one thing that kept popping up was the practice of brood spreading.
You might imagine in a great big hive there would be plenty room but what apparently would happen is the bees would sort of brick themselves in to a central section of the hive
This led to swarming unless the food and pollen combs were moved outward allowing more empty combs to be brought into the brood nest area
Big might not always be best but tall seems better than wide if the bees are prolific

[Dark Bee]

Dark bee in 40 years of beekeeping I have tried pretty well everything. Before I came up here to Scotland I used to run 16 x 10's .To deliberately choose to complicate colony handling is not in my book. I believe in keeping it simple. I have run to brood and a half in the dim and distant past but found it too complicated. Ian Craig uses double brood which is o.k. as all his frames in his brood nests are of the same size. Same goes for the Rose system - all the frames are completely interchangeable from box to box , again not complicated.

Thanks for reply Grizzly, Ian Craig's article is good and well worth reading. Double brood boxes certainly have the advantage of interchangability of frames, but a double standard is perhaps too large - note Ian C. reduces the size and also when appropiate reverts to one box. The Rose boxes were used by Ron Brown decades ago and failed to become popular. My caveat with that system is if one box be removed because of excessive space or for any reason, the remaining box will be too small. The one and a half is not a perfect system, but has stood the test of time. I can recall it being in use over fifty years ago when national hives had doublewalled sides! Being used to it I find it to be versatile and it suits me. But it is for the individual to decide what system he wishes to use and familiarity and perhaps necessity can be decisive factors.

May yer lungs reek
and yer supers creek this Summer

[prakel]

Thanks for the replies so far.

The Ian Craig article is a nice overview of his management scheme, quite enjoyed reading it.

One point about the half which comes to mind reading some of the posts here is that it's too small for my bees to abandon brood rearing in the bottom box -at least, that was so last Summer so both boxes were occupied (brood) for a large part of the season to a greater or lesser extent. If I was using one size box I think that I'd probably be tempted by mbc's approach but I'm not sure it would be helpful (to me) to have the brood nest move away from the deep frames in my current set up.

When I started adding the shallow boxes I did so with the mindset of a single box user. The concern about inability to switch frames between boxes didn't bother me -you can't switch frames if you've only got one box so why feel the need to do so just because you've allowed the bees to extend into another box at some point? I appreciate that more efficient beekeepers will have good reasons for moving brood combs around as a part of their usual management scheme but I'm not sure that it's something I would be interested in adopting.

This started as an idea about nest configuration and is still very much open to tweaking, here, I'm just trying to get some other perspectives -as George Imirie wrote in one of the 'Pink Pages' (well worth a read):

"Does years of experience make one more knowledgeable about beekeeping? NO! Only reading, attending meetings, studying, and LEARNING improves your knowledge".