> I find it amazing the number of brood boxes that you folks use! I hate doubles as they are so hard to work compared with singles; the idea of three is just too much! I am also thinking that your Langstroth is 50% bigger, so three is four and a half times my ideal! What is amazes me more is that the US average crop per colony is less than mine - guess yours all goes into the brood boxes! How cold and long are your winters? I get 1st frost @ October 10 - 15 and this year didn't see pollen until April 3. So here, Maine, the bees are confined for a long time and I want 150 or more pounds of honey on the hive, I have Italian and Carniolans. Our temps are any where from 40 to -20 F through the winter, could be 40 one day and we are our rolling in 6 feet of snow in shorts and then -20 the next. We also have a long dearth end of July through August so the bees are eating the honey or I am feeding. Robbing can be a big problem so I would rather just wait out the dearth with out opening them to often, I treat for mites in August too so depending on what I am using supers come off. My hives came out of the winter strong enough to get two splits from most of them the beginning of May. I sell a 5 frame nuc for $160 US, I figure bees are worth about $25 to $28 a pound since a three pound package here sells for $110. Here honey sells for $8 to $10 a pound, I have to spend all that time with moving around a lot of supers, spend a week in the extracting room, the glass jars are @.80 - .90c each (I will not sell in plastic) I may make about $2.00 a pound I never bothered to figure it out. I would rather spend my time having a lot of bees to sell because every one wants to be a beekeeper and those double hive bodies have 6 to 9 frames of capped brood by the beginning of May and some times extra honey frames to go in the nucs if I need them. Last year my honey crop was about 1,200 US pounds. Fall being the larger crop, 777 pounds. I mainly work alone, have a son who works part time for me when I need him, I am a small apiary and still deciding how big I want to get. My bees do not travel to pollinate my deal with the farmers is they stay put and I get 24/7 access. I get a place to put bees they get pollination we do not exchange money or honey. My area has no monoculture it is more market farms, they sell all types of crops and a lot of it is sold by the farmer there is no middle man. We only have 5 months or less some years where there is any type of nectar flow, I could run singles and they probably would get through the winter with a small cluster but I would not see as many brood frames for nucs in the spring. We each make what we want with our bees, you make honey I make bees. We had about 5 minutes of sun yesterday and I got the queen cells where I wanted them to go. They are looking good, now I know 3 days in the starter is ok. I am a stickler for details sometimes and didn't like my plans being dumped on by days of rain. Thanks for all your feed back. Karen *********************************************** The BEE-L mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned LISTSERV(R) list management software. For more information, go to: http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html