Base For A Beehive

This is a hive base my sister-in-law came up with that allows for flexibility in using a screened bottom board. Four paving stones on top of four cinder blocks allows you to pull out the middle paving stones to allow for extra ventilation during hot weather. The holes in the cinder blocks allow for extra security when strapping your hives down.

Encouraging Beeswax Drawing in One Brood Box

Beginner and small scale beekeepers often fall victim to commercial practices, advice, and online influencers. A little bit of that advice is insightful for all beekeepers, but one practice of using two deep brood boxes and plastic or synthetic comb as part of a beehive north of the Lakes Region of New Hampshire creates challenges often resulting in failure. This is especially frustrating for beginner beekeepers.

Commercial beekeepers have the daunting task of raising lots of colonies of bees under remarkably stressful circumstances, engineering ways to transport them to pollination locations, manage diseases and pests, and mitigate winter losses in order to ensure our food supply chains are not put at risk. Efficiency or any practice that promises support of commercial goals, takes priority.

Enter The Backyard Beekeeper 

For colonies in our small apiaries that are not going anywhere or tasked with such burdens as our national food supply security, management practices should not mimic those of our hard working commercial beekeepers. The practice of two-brood-box hives and the use of synthetic comb are discussed here.

PLASTIC FOUNDATION? - TWO BROOD BOXES?

For those starting out north of the Lakes Region of New Hampshire, wanting their colonies to benefit from beeswax foundation to improve heat transfer for brood warmth regulation, as well as insure pheromone communication between nest mates - as beeswax production by bees and its shaping has evolved to accommodate - two-brood box beehives pose challenges: 

• Getting the colony to draw comb fast enough to fill enough frames with stores for winter.
• Consolidating hives in the fall with enough drawn comb and stores to keep the cluster warm and fed through a long winter.

Problem: In our short season bees may not have enough foraging days to draw comb in two deeps before flows taper. Undrawn frames normally slow colony growth and honey storage. Bees prioritize brood maintenance over building comb when resources are limited. 8 to 10 deep frames placed on top of a brood box demanding attention, instantly upsets the colony's balance - thinning out pheromone distribution and taxing their resources. 

Common Solutions with Issues: Force feeding sugar syrup and pollen substitute is an unhealthy but accepted practice to meet this demand. This is the demand of the beekeeper, not one that supports the needs of the colony. Resorting to using synthetic combs becomes attractive, but colony communication becomes crippled. Bees are very resilient, but management interventions should promote improved beekeeping skills to be passed forward to future generations, not encourage short cuts, especially if they cause stressful compensation efforts by the bees.

OVER-WINTERING 

Problem: Two deep brood boxes full of undrawn frames complicate winter clustering and can leave insufficient contiguous stores where the colony cluster can reach them.

Common Solutions with Issues: It can be awkward consolidating frames to a single well‑filled brood box for winter or strive to ensure frames are arranged so honey stores are contiguous and accessible upward from the cluster. Moving frames so the colony has honey stores in immediate reach can result in empty frames on either side of the cluster going into winter. Feeding sugar syrup in late summer to encourage comb drawing may cause back-filling of drawn comb but does not normally result in new comb late in the season.

TEMPERATURE & INSULATION

Problem: Extra empty space and undrawn comb reduce thermal mass. This means bees must expend more energy to thermoregulate, increasing winter mortality risk.

Common Solutions with Issues: Reduce hive volume in late fall removing empty frames or whole boxes. Two deep brood boxes limit options in managing over-the-cluster stores. Brood could still be capped in the top box or straddling both boxes.

SOME OTHER PROBLEMS WITH TWO BROOD BOX SET UPS:

Robbing: Feeding to stimulate comb build can attract robbers; undrawn comb increases temptation to rob weak colonies.

Handling and inspection frequency: Beginners may be intimidated by lifting heavy brood boxes, have difficulty removing deep frames for inspection, leave frames out of the box to help ease lifting that can cool brood. Large, heavy double deeps are harder to manage.

Resource availability and costs: A beekeeper will need more drawn comb, syrup, pollen substitute, and time—cost and logistics for a beginner.

RECOMMENDATIONS:

In the semester course I have been teaching through Carroll County Adult Ed for the past nine years, the emphasis is on raising healthy bees that can manage their own maladies. I have seen that north of the Lakes Region of New Hampshire we have adequate forage for pretty stellar and varied wild forage for our honey bees - but the short season leads to smaller colonies than in most of the country. 

Smaller colonies also do better with disease & parasite issues. The course promotes following the USDA IPM Pyrimid devised to help beekeepers avoid stepping in where the bees have got it covered, developing good common sense and skill as a beekeeper, and making good choices from the get-go, providing beehive set ups that support the natural survival talents wild colonies are proven to be comfortable doing in the Northeast. I have never had mite counts that meet any threshold requiring treatment in the last 15 years of beekeeping that I have learned to monitor, save a nuc I bought for a teaching apiary from a northern breeder who treated with miticides four times a year. They survived less than four weeks. Mites that survive miticides are the ones breeding in such management practices and I advise against purchasing colonies that are subjected to treatments for that reason. My goal has been to pass along what I have learned from some amazing educators and successful fellow beekeepers here in the northeast to help our students develop great beekeeping skills and good common sense in the craft.

My colony behaviors and survival success motivated me to change from a ten frame hive to an eight frame hive with one brood box and normally about three medium supers during the flowering season. Going into winter these hives can be easily consolidated into one deep brood box with flexibility in arranging medium frames of honey in two medium supers above, meeting the requirement of 60 lbs of honey stored for winter with extra frames of pollen and honey in the brood box. There will always be variables that challenge our bees, but these are things I can do as a skilled beekeeper that have proven to help mitigate over-wintering losses.

Thanks for reading...

Athena Contus ~ Athena’s Bees
Carroll County Adult Education
Cornell University Certified Master Beekeeper
University of Montana Certified Master Beekeeper

REFERENCES:

Slessor KN, Winston ML, LeConte Y. Pheromone communication in the honeybee studies measuring pheromone residues or transfer on comb and wax (gas chromatography, bioassays, brood pheromone assays)(Apis mellifera L.). Journal of Chemical Ecology. 2005;31(11):2731–2745. doi:10.1007/s10886-005-7610-2

LeConte Y, Mohammedi A, Robinson GE. Primer effects of a brood pheromone on honeybee behavioural development. Shows brood pheromone production and its effects mediated through comb/brood presence. Proceedings of the Royal Society B. 2001;268(1463):163–168. doi:10.1098/rspb.2000.1358

Pankiw T. Cued in: honey bee pheromones as information flow and collective decision-making. Discusses how pheromones (including those associated with brood and comb) influence foraging and recruitment. Apidologie. 2004;35(2):137–160. doi:10.1051/apido:2004006 

Southwick EE. Thermal conductivity of wax comb and its effect on heat balance in colonial honey bees (Apis mellifera L.). Experientia. 1985;41(7):845–847. doi:10.1007/BF01953708

Hepburn HR, Radloff SE. Honeybees of Africa. Springer; 1998. (chapter discussing comb structure and thermoregulation; includes measured thermophysical data) ISBN: 9780387986550

Seeley TD. The Wisdom of the Hive: the social physiology of honey bee colonies. Harvard University Press; 1995. (covers comb insulation and colony heat balance) ISBN: 9780674074623