Dave MacFawn wrote:
> You may want to consider a deep and a medium depth super for the brood
> chamber.
 
This practice is very widespread in the UK, particularly in the South,
but I didn't realise it was used anywhere else in the world.  Here we
generally call it "brood and a half".  It's frequently used with British
National hives which are widely considered to have too small a brood
chamber for a strong queen.  Most of the people who taught me my
beekeeping used it so, after a couple of years and once I was
established with a couple of full strength colonies in Nationals, I
thought I should try it too.
 
To put it mildly, I was not impressed.  There are twice as many frames,
so inspections, finding the queen, etc., take longer.  You have two
different types of brood frames so transferring frames of brood or
stores or making up nulclei is less flexible.  In my case, at least, it
didn't seem to greatly reduce the tendency to swarm.  (Putting (honey)
supers on early was much more effective.)  Although there may have been
some improvement in honey yield it was small compared with the natural
year-to-year variation.  After a couple of years I went back to single
brood chambers and I've stayed with them ever since.
 
Nationals are normally worked with 11 frames and I find that at the peak
of brood rearing I get brood on 9 frames.  7 are more or less solid
brood apart from the corners.  When I used brood and a half I found the
active part of the brood nest became more spherical.  The queen went up
into the top half but she didn't go out as far sideways.  I didn't make
any actual measurements but my impresssion was that she laid up about
the same same area of comb.
 
I realise that other climates and other designs of hive may produce
different results but I prefer simplicity.  If I thought a larger brood
chamber would reduce swarming that would be a different matter but I'm
not convinced it does under my circumstances.  I may be slightly
reducing my yield but it can't be by more than something like 10%.  If
I wanted that much extra honey I'd prefer to start an extra hive.
 
--
Malcolm Roe                                Phone  :  +44 1442 345104
Crosfield Electronics Ltd                  Fax    :  +44 1442 343000
Hemel Hempstead, Herts. HP2 7RH, UK        E-mail :  [log in to unmask]
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