I have long noted a very significant difference in hive to hive production.  All my hives are wood.  It is not at all uncommon to have a hive that produces no harvestable honey surplus all summer.  Now those non-productive hives do make honey as I almost never have fed a production hives in the fall, nor have I ever put sugar bricks or fondant on them in winter.   If the hive can not even feed itself I am happy to see it die.   So, the non productive hive makes at least 60 pounds of winter stores plus the summer stores needed to raise brood and fuel the workers.  If I start five new hives on drawn comb in early spring it is normal to see one hive do nothing but feed itself.  It is also normal to see one of the five make a couple of medium supers (60 pounds) of honey to harvest.  The other three are typically someplace in between.  The next year if all five survive it is common to see one hive that again does nothing but feed itself and one hive that makes 150 pounds to harvest with the rest in between.  That worst hive and best hive may or may not be the same hives in both the first and second year.  More often than not they are the same hive.  But, sometimes the bad one in year one is one of the very best in year two or the inverse for the good year one hive.  A lot of that is likely which queen  got superseded or which hive swarmed and got a new queen as a result.  I do not always keep up with marking queens so such events can sure happen and I would never know it.

I suspect what I have seen is pretty typical and would like some others to tell me if they see more or less the same thing.  I see the above regardless if I am using commercial queens or queens I raised myself.  Althou I think my home raised queens do better on average than shipped queens.
So, just today the following link was posted:
https://agriscitech.eu/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/9_AST_3_September_2021.pdf 

In this paper the authors tested six hive configurations ranging from wood boxes with some sort of open slatted rack for a bottom board to polystryrene with a solid bottom board.  OK, this is a nice experiment and if there is enough data to draw conclusions could sure help us back yard beekeepers.  The problem is for the six configurations the authors used only one hive for each of those six configurations.  Then they published their data in a peer reviewed journal!  The journal is Agricultural Science and Technology.  This journal is part of the American Chemical Society (ACS) family of publications.  At one time ACS was recognized as one of the premier places to publish.  It appears to me that today they must publish any old crap as this article sure fits that criteria.  I am dumbfounded that anyone would publish biological results based on single reps.  I am dumbfounded any reviewer would ok such a paper for publication.  We all know from personal experience that biology is simply not that reproducible.  I do not think stuff like this should ever be published and further am concerned by the damage such a publication can do to bee keeping as most folks are not likely to dig into the details far enough to realize there is no meat here.  The fact it was cited on this forum tells me too many people are doing what I do all too often.  That is read the abstract and conclusions and stop there.

Dick




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