Allen Wrote: >I always find it interesting which authors show up on BEE-L and are
willing to defend their ideas -- and change or qualify them if a 
convincing argument is made or evidence produced.

As a writer that has spent plenty of time discussing (and plenty of defending) on Bee-L..I’d like to defend Walt’s checkerboarding ideas.  Please note that we do not (and never have) used checkerboarding with our bees.

>I haven't been following the latest articles on the topic, but
basically, checkerboarding is just spreading brood according to a
formula, with a catchy name.

This is what almost everyone assumes…from novice to commercial beekeeper, I’ve only had a very few conversations about this topic with beekeepers that actually had taken the time to read and understand what Walt was talking about.  

It’s almost as if the word “checkerboard” is some kind of deep visual trigger that lets us “see” the alternating brood frames (and the resulting spread brood that the bees are trying to desperately to cover them).  If this were a mass market product of a large corporation, I expect that focus groups would have revealed this problem with the name, and something less visual would have been used.

BUT

This is not at all what Walt is talking about or recommending.  Walt’s use of the word “checkerboard” applies to the combs ABOVE the brood nest…alternating frames of capped honey with empty comb (or foundation) in the box ABOVE the brood.

We could spend hours discussing what such an operation does to the colony goals, but I think it is sufficient to say that it gives them food in the box to move up in to, while not letting them think the food stores are too abundant.  Plenty of room to move up. Plenty of honey to sustain them when they get there.  Essentially, a damaged nest that must be repaired in earnest.

The best criticism I can think of for checkerboarding (assuming it works as advertised…again, it isn’t a technique we employ) is one I’ve heard from Mike Palmer on the subject (and similar to what Allen said earlier), that there are many ways to accomplish the same thing, and it is unnecessarily restrictive to only keep one “formulaic” tool in the box…that if one understands what is going on and what one is trying to accomplish, there are many ways to accomplish it without checkerboarding an entire box above the brood nest.

It is not accurate, nor is it fair to say that “checkerboarding is just spreading brood according to a formula, with a catchy name.“

In fact, this is specifically one of the topics we are covering in some classes we are teaching on Advanced Topics.  We included this topic not because we think it is the “bee-l and End-l” of swarm prevention techniques, but because it is so commonly misunderstood…and it often does cause great damage when beekeepers (of any level) over spread the brood.

Although (as I stated above) it is unfortunate that the term “checkerboarding” gives us such an immediate visual of alternating brood frames that we don’t feel we need to read further, it is equally unfortunate that readers don’t bother to read further…it is a necessary step towards understanding…and isn’t that the goal afterall?

Deknow (on Ramona’s account)

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