Debbie wrote:
>
> I want to say Hello to all the Beekeepers out there!  Isn't it great to be
> able to
> communicate like this via the net.  I find everything about this place quite
> exciting.  I started beekeeping last May/96, I caught a wild swarm and
> since then have increased to seven hives using only the old swarm's queen.
> I am having twenty nuke boxes made and I'm just about ready to put my new
> queen cells in.  Last winter I put my hives in the basement of our house, I
> really think this might have given the bees an advantage this spring.  It
> was about 45 degrees F.  I want to know if anyone out there only uses one brood
> chamber?  What is the advantage of having 2 or 3 , could you not just make
> certain that you supplied enough honey suppers, so the excess bee population
> could hang out there, therfore they would not be crowding the brood box?
>
> Debbie
> (from Canada.)
 
Sounds like you hit the ground running!  Sounds great.
 
The question about 2 brood boxes or 1 is floating around in several
threads right now.  As I see it, it's sort of a toss-up with regional
climatic and floral factors coming into play to fuel the controversy.
 
A typical queen can lay at least 1500 eggs a day under optimal
conditions, and they take about 21 days to emerge as workers.  There are
about 1200 cells in a deep frame.
To keep the story simple, let's say your queen is laying 1200 eggs a
day. That means she's filling a frame every day. In 21 days she can fill
21 frames.  Factor out the honey and pollen band around the brood on
most frames and you have a queen capable of building up to well over 2
deep boxes of brood under good conditions.  It takes more than 21 days
to reach this point, since buildup is dependant on several factors,
including the number of nurse bees available to cover.  (You have to
have bees to make bees.)  Once you top out the queen's potential, things
stabilize, since at that point more workers go into the field sooner and
the life expectancy of those workers drops off to about (you guessed it)
21 days.  (I've always wondered if giving a queen as much space as she
could possibly use - say 3 deep boxes - and managing in such a way as to
keep it open for brood would reduce the swarm impulse.  In nature the
space is either too small or gets honey-bound, and in managed hives she
rarely gets that much space.  Has anybody tried it?  It sounds like a
lot of work to me.)
 
Whether or not you want all this brood production depends on local
conditions:
 
If you have a strong spring flow for buildup followed by one huge burst
of nectar for a month or two in early summer, you probably want a huge
work force to take advantage of it and should probably give the queen
all the room she can use as early as she can use it.
On the other hand, if you have a long steady nectar flow that runs on
into the fall months, the need for a huge rapid buildup isn't so urgent
and other factors come into play, such as, whether you move the colonies
around a lot for pollination.  If so, a double brood box might be more
hassle than it's worth.
 
There are some other factors in productivity of colonies, but the main
one is population.  More bees per hive make more honey.  Fewer bees per
hive make less honey.  Put another way, 60000 bees in one hive will do
much better than 60000 bees divided evenly between 3 hives with 20000
each.
 
Another factor in the 1 box 2 box decision is how you prepare for
winter.  If you need a strong colony with lots of stores in the fall,
the traditional 2 box system works pretty well.  If you don't really
have winter, and there is a reasonable winter flow, then you might
prefer a more stable population through the year, and not see a need for
2 boxes.
 
As with so many other things in beekeeping, it all depends on your
temprament and circumstances and preferences and prejudices.  I've
greatly simplified the considerations to fit them into this note.  There
is no definitive answer that works for everybody anywhere. I got my
start in north Idaho, and still prefer 2 boxes of brood, even though
most of the people I know in central California are staunch advocates of
the single box.  They seem to do just fine, and so do I.
 
The important thing is to come to your own conclusions and know why you
did so.  The main value of this list is to stimulate the process.
 
Michael Reddell
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http://www.hotcity.com/~mwr