Hi everyone,
I've been toying with an idea for a management scheme, but I feel like 
there's a piece missing from the puzzle yet and I wanted to see if anyone 
could help with ideas.

The scheme would begin in the spring as soon as I've got queen cells ready 
(typically about five weeks before the main honey flow starts here) and 
would apply to full strength colonies with swarm pressure mounting.  I'm 
thinking of removing all the capped brood with a very minimal number of 
bees and placing it above something like a modified double screen board.  
Optionally, I could leave a trap frame of open drone brood in the parent 
hive.  The parent hive could then be used to draw new comb, much as if it 
had swarmed, except it would have at least a few frames of open brood, 
honey, and pollen.  In theory, most of the varroa mites would be removed 
with the capped brood and most of the remaining mites could be trapped in 
a drone frame, reducing the mite load -- I would guess -- by a very high 
percentage.

The capped brood, meanwhile, would hatch out above the double screen board 
with the new queen.  Optionally, I could use a less than 14-day old queen 
cell or maybe put the capped brood above a queen excluder for a few days 
before replacing the queen excluder with a double screen board to ensure 
that all of the transferred brood hatched out before the first of the new 
queen's brood was old enough to get infested with varroa.  I could then 
add a laid up trap frame of drone brood from the parent colony below that 
could catch mites in the brood gap when all the mites would be phoretic 
and there was no other brood to infest.

At the start of the honey flow I could either kill the old queen and 
combine or set off the split or run a two-queen colony.

Besides the labor cost -- which in exchange for swarm control, new drawn 
comb, natural varroa control, new queens, and optional prepared splits 
seems reasonable, at least for my circumstances -- the one big problem I 
can foresee is mites migrating through the double screen board back to the 
parent colony.  I'd like to keep the colonies together, though, both for 
easier subsequent combining and in order to be able to keep most of the 
bees with the laying queen (while ensuring against the brood getting 
chilled in the split).

I'm not very content with the only solution I've thought of, though, which 
is to put a layer of fine mesh between the two layers of regular 8-mesh 
hardware cloth.  The idea would be that the heat could still rise up 
through the fine mesh, but the bees wouldn't be able to get at it to 
propolize it.  Of course, the idea is that the mesh would be fine enough 
that mites couldn't pass through.  Alternatively, maybe I could just 
replace the upper layer of hardware cloth with a fine mesh, and maybe the 
small number of bees above wouldn't propolize their floor until after the 
brood had hatched.

What recommendations can you all make for optimizing/fine-tuning such a 
scheme?  And do you think my goals could be achieved with the scheme?

Eric

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