In article <000901c3b1c8$b645a920$08aebc3e@oemcomputer>, Christine Gray
<[log in to unmask]> writes
>The posts on this theme have however been quite
>outstandingly informative and educative - one of the best demonstrations of
>the value of Bee-L for communicating up-to-date ideas and practices.
You will thus probably have gathered that the majority of those
commercial operators on this list will view their involvement with bees
as being a privilege. A life spent amongst bees is a thing to look back
on with great satisfaction. You would not be able to do that if you had
just been a 'factory farmer'. I think we all probably love what we do,
otherwise we would not do it. We could make more secure money in a
regular job in most cases.
Some amateurs make the mistake of looking down on us as somehow lesser
creatures because we 'exploit' our bees 'just for the money', when what
we really are are beekeepers lucky enough to be in a position to do what
we love full time. When you do that you become quick and agile in
observation and management, and cram a lot of experience gathering into
a few seasons. The fact you do it quickly is misunderstood as being
shoddy by some. Again, till they see you in action and then they
generally change their viewpoint.
Some never do, and harangue you about not taking time to do wing
venation assays for morphometry etc, etc, etc. Each to his own. Some
love their bees for the academic side of it, some for the pleasure, some
for the honey, some for a mixture of everything. It gives me a wonderful
quality of life, if not such a wonderful standard of living.
>
>So, next year I intend to set up a few colonies on double UK standard
>(medium) brood boxes to compare it with my normal long boxes for deep
>frames as a method for hobby beekeeping - despite deciding 30 years ago that
>using 2 brood boxes was inherently too clumsy to be fun, and that finding
>queens in two boxes was always more tricky than on one set of deep frames.
>Each box will however have only 9 frames and 2 dummies - I will still hold
>to my belief that u have to be able to create free space in every brood box
>for handling combs without jarring bees if u want to minimise disturbance
>when operating a hive, and 9 frames reduces the weight to be lifted.
I don't understand why someone would be jarring the bees, as that would
require some rough handling. However, that aside, your bees will soon
enough tell you what they want. If they put brood right out to the walls
then you have not given them enough width in the 9 bars, if they don't
you are probably OK. Personally I don't think the BS box evolved
entirely by accident and would leave them with 10 or 11 as designed.
>
>Are any UK beekeepers on the list doing just this already? Have they made
>any careful comparison of 'double 9' against the more normal UK practice of
>using one standard and one shallow box for brood, each with 11 frames?
Not with BS I haven't, where we keep our Smith hives in full width boxes
of 11, doubling up (or more) in mid season after the swarm control and
manipulations are over with the intention of breaking back down to
singles again for winter.
However, I have tried it in the Langstroth unit, both 9's and 8's. I
found it constrained the bees and caused early onset of cell building,
by a week or 10 days. At 8 you have 20% less capacity in the box, and
thus need 20% more hive bodies. Late season it caused a noticeable
deficiency in production during the last two weeks of the heather crop.
This was however in a unit using excluders, and below the excluder was
plugging up with honey and thus curtailed the amount of young bees
available to forage at that time. Black bees in particular are guilty of
plugging below excluders in doubles, and sometimes even in singles from
mid July onwards as the day length starts to shorten. Running without
excluders at that time might have produced a different result.
I had a bonfire a few seasons back and burned all the dummy boards,
which will illustrate what my conclusion was.
That all schemes are personal, and linked to your own circumstances and
goals, is well illustrated by the fact that another operator around here
has come to the exact opposite conclusion and is running all 8's with
two dummies.
>
>Allen's final words will be pinned up in the Bee Shed:
> "One of the signs of an excellent beekeeper is the consistent suitability
>of his or her colonies and equipment to the purpose at hand, and consistent
>management. Commercial or hobbyist, consistent, knowledgeable and purposeful
>management is the mark of excellence in beekeeping."
Allen does express these things very well.
Murray
--
Murray McGregor
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