2 queens better than 2 hives??

[SweetPeaApiary]

I just read about having two queens per hive at http://www.pugetsoundbees.org/03-2003.pdf

The theory seems to be that there is a syneregy that lets a 2 queen hive be better than 2 one queen hives. I don't see the advantage right off though. It seems the total number of bees would be the same, and the total number of eggs layed a day should be the same. Is the proportion of house bees to foragers different; maybe a hive only needs so many house bees no matter how big the hive.(?) Is it easier to keep the internal temperature and humidity decent?

I am not sure I want to try this setup as this is my first yer keeping. But I am interested in knowing what is going on.

[Michael Bush]

Search on "two queen hives" "two queens in a hive" etc. and you will find many discussions on the subject.

Two Queen hives

I will preface this with the fact that I’ve done this and think it is USUALLY easier to just run two one queen hives. The biggest problem for me is that you have a super hive with supers stacked up to the clouds and bees everywhere and to do anything with the queens requires moving and disturbing every box. All those bees can be very intimidating to a beginner. I think to be practical it requires a system that does not require moving any boxes to get to either queen.

That said, the concept is that two queens will lay twice as many eggs and build up twice as fast in the spring. More workers, more honey.

Here is my design. I would set up a horizontal hive that is three boxes long. (48 ¾”) with the entrances on the long side. Make it so you can open or close an entrance on any third of the box on any of the two long sides.

The box needs two grooves into which a piece of a queen excluders fits to divide it into thirds. This allows a queen on each end and supers in the middle.

A variation that won’t communicate quite is as well, is to build a three box wide bottom board and just put three boxes on with an excluder/includer on the bottom of the outside boxes where the queens are. Close the entrances to the outside boxes and leave the middle box entrance open. The disadvantage to this is the drones can’t get out of the brood chambers because of the excluders and if a new queen is raised she can’t get out to mate. A solution to these issues is you can put a 3/8” inside diameter tube in a hole in the box for a drone escape, or you can put some kind of upper entrance on the brood boxes, either a hole drilled in them, an inner cover with a notch or any other method of top entrance.

You can use any of several methods to get the hive to accept two queens, but they are separated enough to not fight and you have two brood nests and one stack of supers in the middle. You can purchase queens, leave the hive queenless for 24 hours and split the brood nest into the two brood boxes with a caged queen in each and try for simultaneous introduction.

If you raise your own queens, you could put a virgin on each end and hope they fly back to the right hive when they are done mating.

You can split the brood into the two brood boxes and divide the hive with a partition, instead of an excluder to make one side queenless and then remove the partition when the queen cells are doing well on the queenless side. It is an art and you need to practice and accept that it may not work the way you think the first few times.

The best time to get two queens laying is early in the spring. The earlier the better. During the honey flow you might be better off to split the hive and put all of the open brood in one of them and most of the bees in the other to up the production in that hive because lots of brood rearing DURING a honey flow does not help production.

Snelgrove had a plan for using one hive to stock the other that was quite ingenious and perhaps some way could be figure out to do that in a more horizontal configuration.

[topbarguy]

Greetings,

I tested the vertical two queen system on about a dozen hives for 10 years. It's an interesting approach. But I've abandoned it. Two seperate hives are much easier to work. They require less manipulation. And there's less risk involved with one of them failing.

About the only advantage to a vertical two queen hive is the cost savings of a bottom board, assuming that a division board costs the same as a migratory cover. And the added bragging rights of a bazillion lbs/hive production.

The horizontal two queen approach has some very interesting possibilities. I haven't tried it.

Regards
Dennis

[Michael Bush]

>A variation that won’t communicate quite is as well, is to build a three box wide bottom board and just put three boxes on with an excluder/includer on the bottom of the outside boxes where the queens are.

Just an update. I'm not having much luck with this method. The lack of communication between the boxes is noticable and it's hard to get the bees to move into the supers.

The 48 3/4" long box works much better.

[Tia]

I've got a vertical two-queen colony and I'll never do it again--with the honey supers, the hive is way too tall; I have to stand in my wagon to get into the top and I'm gonna have a dickens removing the upper deep to take off the honey supers. Maybe next year I'll try a horizontal because this colony is producing more honey than two separate hives. I've copied the plans and photos that one of the posters (I can't remember who) had supplied and I like the way it looks--easy to work on. We'll see.

[Bill_newbee]

Michael, is what you are saying that you have tried using normal boxes over an elongated 3-wide bottom board but that the communication is reduced adversely affecting the use of the other boxes? I was wondering myself this week whether such a horizontal hive might work and was just getting around to try it, having seen your pics awhile back. Was gearing up to ask anyhow whether that configuration was working out. Are you saying that a single longer box will work out better? I was kinda hoping to be able to reuse all those medium boxes we built recently.

[This message has been edited by Bill_newbee (edited June 26, 2004).]

[Michael Bush]

>is what you are saying that you have tried using normal boxes over an elongated 3-wide bottom board but that the communication is reduced adversely affecting the use of the other boxes?

Yes.

>I was wondering myself this week whether such a horizontal hive might work and was just getting around to try it, having seen your pics awhile back. Was gearing up to ask anyhow whether that configuration was working out.

It works, but not as well.

>Are you saying that a single longer box will work out better?

Yes.

>I was kinda hoping to be able to reuse all those medium boxes we built recently.

Just put them on top for supers. No reason you can't run a basically horizontal hive with some supers on top of the long box. I do it all the time.

It's just trying to use just mediums on a long bottom board is hard to get the bees to work the next box over. Of course you can put the supers on top of the "main" chamber and move them over beside when they are mostly full and that can work too, but requires more effort than having a long box with better communication.

At least that's been my experience.

[BeeBear]

I have read quite a number of articles which stated that a two-queen colony produces more honey than two standard colonies. Can anyone point me to data on HOW MUCH more? Based on what I have read, it sounds like the two-queen system is a lot more hassle and unless the difference is dramatic, not something I want to try.

Or maybe it's worth trying it just as a learning experience.

[Michael Bush]

Let's put it this way. When I ran a vertical two queen hive, it was more work than running four regular hives. There were so many bees (and I was a newbie at the time) and some many supers to move to get to the brood chambers and they were so prone to swarm. I decided it was a fun experiment and left it at that. I have designed and built a horizontal one now but haven't populated it yet. It has the advantage that you could use the two queen concept to requeen the hive. In other words the old queen and the young queen are both laying in early spring when the resulting bees will help with the harvest and then get rid of the old queen before the main flow so there is less brood through the flow and more foragers. In the process you have replaced the old queen but used them both for a period when it would be most beneficial to the colony.

All in all it's a lot of trouble and work and I think you'd be hard pressed to find a commercial beek who is using them.

Whether the labor break even point is two, three, or four hives it's been easier to just run more one queen hives for the same amount of harvest.

But I haven't tried using the horizontal arrangement and the requeening concept.

[Beemaninsa]

I have 20 colonies set up to use as 2 box horizontal colonies. The hives consist of a deep and a medium side by side with entrances in opposite directions. One stack of supers in the middle over a queen excluder.
The only special equipment needed are 2 half tops. Hives can be run as seperate colonies after honeyflow. I try not to go in to brood boxes during a flow, however few brood frames are accesable without super removal.
I have not run this configuration long enough to make a good assesment, but it seems promising so far. Any comments?

[Michael Bush]

I ran a similar hive for a while once. The only downsides were the typical ones. Too tall. Too many supers to move to get to the brood chamber. But it worked better than an all vertical one where it got even taller.

You may have less problems with swarming than I have in a more horizontal hive. They (the horizontal hives) seem prone to swarm.