>We have found that the single brood chamber is
the best for our conditions and bees. 

We too have been doing this for the past 34 years!

Colonies are run in a single British National brood box and supers added as required.  We only use double brood when we have colonies fail and the boxes need looking after; this year there may be quite a number of those as the exceptionally poor weather in May resulted in colonies that had swarmed early not producing viable queens and the dire weather that followed did not allow us to rear queens.  However, batches of queens reared recently do seem to have mated well so we may be able to salvage something.

Where colonies are wintered on doubles we will split them at the earliest opportunity in the spring as we find it much easier to manage colonies on single brood.  First inspections are very thorough and we ensure that all queens are clipped and marked; after that our inspections are now much quicker and, as we get older, we now tend to tip colonies to look for queens cells rather than inspect every frame.  Where cells are found we make an artificial swarm (Pagden method).

This simple strategy has produced an average crop, based on the number of colonies fed the previous autumn, of 65lbs per colony from 1981-2014.

Of course, out bees are native (or near-native) A.m.m.  If we were running Italians then we would have no option other than to run at least double brood - and feed an awful lot more!  We are now feeding only 10-15 lbs of fondant per colony.

Best wishes

Peter 
52°14'44.44"N, 1°50'35"W

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