Allen Dick wrote:
>
> > > 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?
>
> > 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.
>
> Hmmm.  I just counted the cells on a sheet of Permadent and got about 42
> by 78 on each of 2 sides.  That amounts to about 6550 cells per standard
> comb.
>
> At nine combs per box, that yields ~59,000. Divided by 21 that is ~2800
> cells available for brood and stores per day.  Ten frames provides more.
>
> As I recall, the standard box was originally designed to provide enough
> space for a normal queen to function well.
>
> I've broken many many double brood colonies down manually at peak of
> buildup to put all the brood and queen into a single for comb production
> and seldom found a queen that had more than a standard box of brood.  Some
> would have brood on 12 or so combs, but then it be comprised of some half
> combs of brood, and, if consolidated, would fit on 9.  Most had about 7 or
> 8 frames full of brood, so after a yard of working 24 hives - many with 9
> frames - we would have 3 or 4 extra supers with brood to  use for nucs.
>
> We found that the singles from comb production did not winter as well as
> the doulbles, but attributed that to the fact that the queen had to
> compete with nectar for cells during the flow, since the supers were
> entirely full of foundation.
>
> Allen
 
Someday I'll learn to lay off the arithmetic!  Obviously I blew my point
on that one.  Oh well.  But anyway, my experience is that it's very
common to find double brood boxes with 8 frames of nearly solid brood in
each story and
a single frame of honey on each side. I always use 10 frames in brood
boxes. In this arrangement there is often a ceiling of honey just below
the excluder about 1 or 2 inches thick.  Last year I had an especially
strong colony from which I took 9 solid frames of brood in the months of
March and April for swarm control and they still maintained 16 solid
brood frames throughout the season!
Maybe this suggests that we're under-estimating laying capacity when we
say the queen can lay 1500-2000 eggs per day.
 
I have also noticed that doubles tend to winter better, even though we
hardly have winter here.
--
Michael Reddell
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http://www.hotcity.com/~mwr