a Mr Krengel snip... 

I was talking to a beekeeper from the University of Minnesota who contended they prefer to overwinter on three deeps.  Indeed all beekeeping is local.

my comment...
In conversation some time ago with Marla Spivak (sp?) she informed me that they overwinter stock at the Minnesota lab in three deeps.  I am guessing this has much to do with not biasing individual hives that are used for breeding purpose.

Years ago Steve Taber wrote about maintaining bees in various odd shaped boxes at fairly extreme altitudes.  From what I can recall the narrow and taller shaped boxes worked better than the 'cube' shaped boxes.  

I prefer to maintain hives here in story and a half configuration but I can feed all winter long.  Not long from now all the honey collection hives will be manipulated into the approximate same configuration as Jerry Hays described in an article (about 1985) 'is a queen excluder a honey excluder'.  When you remove the honey and remove the excluder you do have to be careful in that there may be no honey below the excluder.

             ***********************************************
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