On Wed, 18 Jul 2001 10:44:19 -0400, Brad Young <[log in to unmask]> wrote:


>Has anyone else used three deep hive bodies for brood?  Does it have any
>merit?  Can a queen fill all three deep hive bodies before she would have
>had room back in the one that she started in?  Assuming, probably wrongly,
>that she could and the hive would thus be that much bigger and, presumably,
>collect more nectar, I would hate to think of how tall the hive could grow
>with the needed supers on it.  I guess you would have to extract in stages,
>but I am now a believer in George Imirie's advice about adding all supers
>at once.  Any opinions or experience with this method of brood chambers?
  All my hives have three deep hive bodies, I started doing this when I
had to start medicating for Varoa in August, our largest flowes are usually
the golden rod flow and since I had the bees and the equipment, why not.
  The hives do get quite high, yesterday I was using a step ladder to add
a fourth deep to my permanent pollenation hives to give them enough room
to keep the farmers happy.
  I will admit that the extra deeps have some good and bad points.  The
first is that the bees will fill the entire bottom deep with pollen and
sometimes parts of the second. they also will fill the sides of all the
deeps with honey so that the queen is working the middle three or four
frames all the way up and still into the honey supers. I have never had
to add pollen substitue in the spring as they always have far more than
they can use.
  Since going to the three deep, assuming young queens and the extra pollen
and in normal years the extra honey etc, I have found that they build up
extremely fast, some times to fast in the spring. I am also able to pull of
the extra deep (4th) from my pollenation hives and give to my 5 frame nucs
to overwinter.
 In the spring you can pull off the extra deep from the bottom, check
frames,paint etc and the hive still has plenty of room to grow, do have the
extra work of moving some of the pollen up into the brood chambers above to
avoid an imbalance. I also found using this system that they overwinter
more droans, but I still haven't started my queens earlier yet.
  In normal years (the last two have not been normal) I have never had to
feed and had excess honey still on the hives in the spring.
  The negatives that a I have found are when they a swarm they are extremely
large, and you must requeen once a year as the queens do seem to burn out
faster, I have also seen my swarming go down using this method.
  Its also a lot more work trying to find the queen in the fall to requeen.
 I'm going to try the Imire(? sp) shims next year as I have found that
on isolated hives if I leave the honey supers offset so the bees can enter
they seem to prefer the upper entrance and I get less brood in the honey
supers. Hope this helps
                                                 mike bassett
                                                 central mass + conn