Aaron asked about Dr Furgala's Two Queen Horizontal Management System.
I will try to provide a little information even though it has been
several years since I too the class from Basil.

First yes the system did involve "depopulating" old colonies in the
fall and overwintering only strong healthy colonies headed by young
queens.  Lets start in the spring of the year.  You have strong colonies
that have come through winter and may have been fed pollen substitute in
late winter and early spring ( late February and March ).  Colonies were
wintered in three deep broodboxes and are managed that way during the
early buildup period.  Regular ( 7 - 10 day) reversals are done first
just the top two boxes but starting in mid to late April full reversals
are done.  Heavy box on bottomboard lightest box on top.  Often it is a
"reverse around the middle" with the top box going to the bottom and the
bottom to the top.  This greatly stimulates expansion of the broodnest.
In mid May here in St Paul ( note about 6 weeks before the target date
for the main honey flow ) these colonies are divided to prevent
swarming.  Only colonies with a minium of 10 frames of brood are
considered strong enough to divide and you usually have 12+ frames of
brood.  About half the brood goes with each part of the split.  The new
split is given a mated queen and kept in the same yard as the parent on
a different stand.  This greatly helps with queen acceptance but making
a unit with only young house bees to requeen.  If no nectar flow is on
they should be fed 1:1 sugar syrup to simulate a nectar flow and again
improve queen acceptance.  Usually 95%+ of the queens are accepted this
way.  The parent colony is now in two deeps and is usually supered at
this time just to give them some space.  The reversals continue on the
parent for a few more weeks but are done when the nectar flow hits
usually late June or July 1.  The split is given a second deep box a
week after queen introduction and they quickly move into this box and
fill it.  A third box is added once the second story is filled and
reversals are also done if needed to keep the broodnest expanding.  Late
June or early July the split is given a final reversal and supered.  The
parent colony is your main honey producing unit and they usually need
two or three supers at the time of making the divide and by late June
will need a couple more.  Continue to add supers as needed but by mid to
late July the flow is usually slowing and supering is cut back or
stopped.  Splits will usually produce a couple of medium supers or more
depending on the flow and the parents will usually produce at least 4
often more.  The split is harvested and then treated for mites and
prepared for wintering in three deeps.  The parent is harvested down to
the second deep and in the late fall killed.  The split is overwintered
to start the cycle again in the spring.

I know it sounds complicated at first but you are keeping young queens
in all your colonies, wintering only strong healthy colonies with young
queens, prevent swarming, and maintaining strong healthy colonies of
bees at all times of the year with population peak at the start of the
main nectar flow.  You kill the parent colonies in the fall to keep from
continually increasing your colony count.  It does give you the winter
months with broodboxes that can be scraped, you can cull bad combs, get
boxes repainted etc.  You do need more broodboxes and additional
bottomboards and covers.  It also works very well for honey production
here in the upper Midwest USA.

Now what about combining parents with splits for overwintering?  You
would want to find and remove ( ok kill ) the old queen so as to winter
with the young queen.  The other observation is that mite levels usually
are higher in the parents than the splits so you would be increasing the
mite load on the combined colonies relative to the splits.  Before mites
combining looked better to me than it does now.  Of course there are
endless variations of this system that may work well in different areas
but the basic things are keeping young queens and strong disease free
colonies and only overwintering these strong healthy colonies.  The old
beekeeper saying "Take you winter losses in the fall." comes to mind
here.  The most consistent methods of swarm control all involving
splitting the colonies in some way which leads to the problem of
increasing colony numbers to deal with somehow.

Yes this management system was developed well before mites but has been
very successfully used since and continues to be taught by the U of MN
now by Dr Spivak.

The hardest part is the "depopulating" or evicting of the parent hives
in the fall no question about it.  Before mites I usually combined as
Aaron suggested so as to boost any "weaker" colonies to go into winter
with nice large clusters and lots of stores.

This is just a short summary but hopefully it will be helpful for those
who have not heard about it.

blane


******************************************
Blane White
MN Dept of Agriculture
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