I think Mike's questions and skepticism are valid, and 99% of the people I talk to are just as reluctant to checkerboard.  They tell me it just doesn't seem natural and seems to violate everything the bees would do on their own.  I've never encountered as much resistance, even indignant outrage, to any other suggestion in beekeeping as this topic of broodnest manipulation.
 
Checkerboarding, or to a lesser extreme, slipping an empty frame into the brood nest, is simply a management technique.  Most of what we do, in the name of "management" is really a manipulation of the bees' best qualities to further enhance their production (which most of us do with other managerial options such as reversing brood boxes to thwart swarming).
 
But for some reason, checkerboarding seems to rise our ire without much problem.  I find it somewhat ironic how checkerboarding takes on the heightened nuance of a moral issue (manipulating the brood nest) when most of what we do in the normal course of beekeeping is really for our benefit of pushing the bees to greater levels of production than if we left them in the hollow of a tree.
 
I checkerboard and the bees have responded favorably.  Yeah, it's a little more work but the benefits outweigh the labor.  I think if you'd try it, you might like it.
 
Grant
Jackson, MO


      

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