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.
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?
Beekeepers north of New Hampshire's Lakes Region need their colonies to benefit from beeswax foundation because bees have evolved to produce and shape beeswax to facilitate heat transfer for brood-warmth regulation and preserves pheromone communication. Two-brood box beehives pose challenges:
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. Keep in mind that I do not use a queen excluder. 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
I put together this slide show for our club winter hive setup round-table. Some may find it useful.
Wrapping my mind around why these things work for me in our cold-hardiness zones has been very helpful and I owe a lot to past mentors, fellow beekeepers and teachers.
There is also this older blog post.
One morning at our Ferncroft home in Wonalancet an odd, amber glow from outside illuminated our bedroom through its big farm windows. I was typically up at dawn and sitting out at our streamside picnic table, sipping my black coffee, cat by my side, enjoying the country quiet that was there back in those days.
It was Phoebe, a little black cat who had come with me from Hawaii in 1998, who could not wait for the sun.
She was 14 then and lived another six years; but after a difficult night in my arms waited one last time for me to habitually wake with the morning light, stretched in a yawn, then was gone.
It was October and neither Gus nor Phoebe before him, clever as they may be, could chameleon their monochrome fur against the fallen kaleidoscope of autumn leaves.
I sat on the steps of the porch with my coffee, troubling: Do the bees have enough food to get through winter? But somehow this phenomenal glow gave me peace of mind all was well in my world.
That was twelve years ago. Now tiger-striped Simon sits curled up by my side and outside, once again, an orange colored sky. He's too sleepy to care but I'm still aware of the beehives clustering in the 40F temps, getting ready for a long winter.
Well, so, this day's orange colored sky has me reflecting on memories of Gus, my little buddy, that beautiful morning... but also of my time passed with lost family, lifelong friends, hives, and pets gone the way of the falling leaves. RIP Despina, Sean, Maureen...so many more...
So grateful to still be here, worrying about my bees, enjoying the company of my cat, but especially to be experiencing our beautiful world despite all the dramatic changes growing older must witness.
So fast the times pass.
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| Hives Mt Israel 2025 |
Some good options I have found in preparing for a hive inspection or if I feel I need to get out to the apiary but the weather isn't cooperating - too hot especially - It is remarkable how much data can be collected from outside the hive:
Use your phone to video the coming and going of each hive for at least one full minute.
Do the math on swarm event colonies:
I assume a virgin queen is present in the parent hive on the swarm date and calculate when to expect capped brood from her. Remember that capped brood from the queen that swarmed may still be present and will emerge by about day 21. I wait until the new queen has had time to mate, begin laying, and produce a progression from open brood to capped brood before inspecting - typically about 16–18 days: ~5 days for her to get established, 2–3 days to mate, and ~9 days until the first brood is capped. Leaving the colony alone after a swarm reduces unnecessary disturbance, and doing the math helps avoid inspecting too early and worrying that she didn’t return from mating. You should still have time to buy and install a replacement queen if needed; meanwhile, colonies without brood mainly continue storing honey.Depending on how many colonies you have this data can form a respectable view of their status and fill several pages in your notebook. I find it empowering to help me put a good plan in place before I go in on a good weather day and rock their world.
18 days turned out to be exactly correct to a hive with a swarm virgin on July 1st; but I did not see any evidence of a laying queen! So I drove out to a beekeeper who had one and did not get back in to re-queen until day 23 Much of this math was presumed based on the day the swarm left the hive, but instead of finding developing and capped brood - now it is day 23 - I actually now discovered about two day old larvae! They had a queen! I can only guess that heat and rain delayed her mating flight and laying in safe temperatures. Luckily, beekeeper friend, Kelly, needed a queen! All is right with the universe.
Through years of drought and rain they have thrived. The winds this winter, however, were not just from the north, and not just in high-speed occasional gusts; but sustained winds in double digits shook our own house as well as the beehives from what seemed all directions.
Hives were wrapped, quilt boxes on, in the same configuration that has served the girls so well over the years. It may have been I took my foundations and hive stands for granted, so I'll work on rebuilding and perfecting those things. Maybe a more significant wind block on all sides.
All we can do is the best we can with what we know and even in my 18th season there are new lessons to learn.
Meanwhile, the willows and alder bloomed with much less of a hum to cheer them into spring. The cherry and service berry trees lost their blossoms too soon; but our old cider apple tree is pretty good at waiting for the last frost of the season.
It is so cold now, this 19 day of May, that frost could be around the corner.
Prunella coats the landscape side by side with wild violets and strawberry flowers. Lots of rain may bring summer nectar in abundance. Beekeepers can always hope.
No matter what the wind or weather, dandelions are the faithful flowers thriving in the background of these sometimes catastrophic times for the beekeeper. Dandelions don't necessarily need bees as they are capable of pollinating themselves; but apis mellifera, our honey bee, is just one of many bee species that need dandelions.
I was reminded most recently at our Dandelion Festival in Wonalancet last weekend that dandelions share a heritage with honey bees of healing and repair of our heavily cultivated lands
To begin with it is important to note that honey bees are the only pollinators that over winter as a family. In our northern climate these families can be 40,000 members strong. That's a lot of mouths to feed!
Both honey bees and dandelions arrived in the 1600s with our European ancestors, but while timber was harvested and land cultivated to build our towns & cities, nearly 140 species of native North American bees were suddenly at risk of losing habitat and forage necessary for survival.
Interestingly, large honey bee families took up the slack, so to speak, as their need for nectar & pollen, containing essential carbohydrates & proteins, moved them to source a wide variety of New World plants.
As a result, Honey bees fortuitously restored nearly lost native floral sources that would in turn invite these valuable native bees and other pollinators back to our lands. In this way, now centuries later, as we’ve expanded development across the country, researchers believe honey bees to have earned status as a keystone species. So why are dandelions so important to this generalist pollinator?
While native bees are solitary insects preferring specific nectar and pollen sources, sometimes only active when certain flowers are in bloom, honey bees start spring as a robust colony with nutritional needs to satisfy all season long. They are there on the earliest flowers as the snow melts, moving on to the blossoms of fruit trees, as well as maple, birch, oak and other deciduous tree flowers, always scouting the landscape for the next big bloom.
While our flowering plants and trees take turns looking for attention, some offering nectar, some pollen, some both; weather and climate are a constant challenge to all our pollinators, but reliably, the humble dandelion is there, much like the honey bee, having journeying across continents, picking up the slack, surviving in the most unlikely of places wherever the soil has been disrupted for fields, farms, and cities, on the road edges, sparkling in the sun on our lawns, all late spring through summer.
The dandelion offers pollen and nectar in abundance for a hard working family of bees feeding their young. The dandelion root runs deep, healing disturbed ground, bringing nutrients in abundance as a medicinal plant with all parts having value.
For the bees, dandelions are not the most supreme source of nutritious pollen and nectar, but they are there during times of drought and rain, scarcity and transition, reliable as long as we support their growth to the benefit of all bees.
Since this day of the dandelions I've looked more closely at where I see them grow on our own land; They are in the mowed paths, where the fence post holes were dug, all around the ground that was leveled for my beehives in the apiary. I have to watch where I step!
The girls know too, where and when the dandelion blooms for them.
Also to note: Two of the presenters at the first ever Wonalancet Dandelion Festival were Ethan & Amy of Again and Again Farm. They are fellow vendors at the Tamworth Farmers Market, humble farmers with a wealth of information to share for the good of the soil. Always a good place to visit good people.
