Planning next year - Checkerboarding

[mbc]

.... if done right it really does move a colony on, by on average a frame of brood a week until at 7-8 frames they jump two a week, and at 9-10 I give them another brood chamber beneath and let them get on with it.

PH

We went through this some time ago on the other place. If you're going to make these claims it would be better to have statistical evidence from controlled trials, otherwise it's just hearsay.
FWIW I believe that it is possible to increase the appearance of a colony, but performance will subsequently dip as the reality of the empty increase hits home as the shorter lived bees produced die off quicker without being very productive. Of course, this is also guesswork and hearsay, but if I remember correctly, Tauts did do some proper work that showed bees raised under suboptimal conditions had short and ineffective(with regard to benefit to the colony) lifespans.

[Poly Hive]

Why not try it mbc? It's worked for me for donkeys years, and for Struan who run some 750 boxes. They for sure don't do it for fun and nor do I for that matter. Again what I mean by brood spreading might not be what you think it is?

As for hearsay well that puts Manley et all in the same group does it not as all their writing was based on personal experience. Not all info can be gained from double blind drug trial type experiments. After reading about the colony model that some geek has produced the next thing will be well you can't do that as the model says... Aye well I hae ma doots ya ken.

PH

[mbc]

Why not try it mbc? It's worked for me for donkeys years,

PH

I gave it a fair crack as Ted Hooper seemed to advocate a bit of brood spreading in the spring, and I had a lot of time for his writing, however, it fell by the wayside many years ago for my continuing bee management practices as I couldn't see any benefit by the end of the season compared to colonies left un-meddled with in this way.
Perhaps I didn't posses the skill and fine judgement necessary to outdo the bees in deciding how best to configure their nest at a time when they were already trying to push it to the max. Maybe your judgement is better than mine PH, or possibly your bees less capable, but for my bees in my area under my management I found brood spreading a complete waste of time and effort more likely to do harm to the colony than good.

[Jon]

Other than introducing drone comb at the edge of the cluster when the cluster is big enough in Spring - - with a view to subsequent queen rearing I would also leave alone.

[mbc]

I like to leave them a gap to build drone comb, I do this by cutting off the bottom half of comb from some frames. I think the action of building drone comb helps alleviate swarming and it ensures my drones are raised in fresh, uncontaminated wax (.. they're more likely to be fertile) and it satisfies the bees desire to build some drone comb so other areas of worker foundation is more likely to be drawn correctly. If I'm rushing to get through a pile of colonies these frames(with a previously marked topbar) are good ones to pull to give a quick read of the colony.

[Jon]

That would work well. Must give it a try.

[Castor]

Having kicked off this thread a while back, this discussion now seems to be about something very different to what I understood Walt Wright's technique to be which is essentially disrupting the nectar ceiling of the colony in order to manipulate the urge to swarm - not this brood spreading thing.
I've tried discussing this locally as well, calling it "nectar management" rather than "checkerboarding"and immediately the discussion turns to "brood spreading". I don't understand why!

From http://www.honeybeesuite.com/checker...of-beekeeping/

"Many misconceptions surround checkerboarding. The most common one is that it interferes with the brood nest. It does not. Checkerboarding is performed in the honey storage areas above the brood nest, not in the brood rearing areas, so it is an excellent and non-invasive swarm management technique".

[mbc]

I think checkerboarding is alien to most UK beekeepers because we don't tend to have our bees arranged with the nest in one box and another box full of honey above them conveniently waiting to be fiddled with.

[Mellifera Crofter]

I thought that's what most people do do in the UK, MBC - they separate the honey from the brood and queen with a queen excluder.

I don't use a queen excluder, so I do manipulate the honey frames to some extent - but mainly in an attempt to stop the queen from moving higher up in the hive - not as described by Castor, although I do keep it in mind sometimes. (But I've only kept bees for five years - I still need to learn a lot.)
Kitta

[Castor]

Well we are going to give this a go this year with a few hives - probably six - and see how we go. With the weather and it's weirdness over the past couple of years it's going to be interesting spotting the start of the build-up, which appears to be key.