Hi everybody,
Assuming only deep boxes (brood and honey boxes), how many should one colony needs ? And I mean not only the ones ON the colony, but the spare ones too, the ones you stack on when you harvest the full ones.
Thank you
Hugo
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Hi everybody,
Assuming only deep boxes (brood and honey boxes), how many should one colony needs ? And I mean not only the ones ON the colony, but the spare ones too, the ones you stack on when you harvest the full ones.
Thank you
Hugo
To use Michael's well worn phrase, it depends....
If you are going with unlimited broodnest, you need at least three deeps just for that. Then for honey supers, one or two is probably the bare minimum, depending on how often you plan to extract. Another spare or two, in case you need to do a split, or the hive gets away from you and swarms, and you are fortunate enough to catch it. 6-8 deep supers per hive is a rough guess.
We keep three per colony. Some of them will get extracted more than once.
Don't foeget that if you are just starting a hive out you will not need all the deep supers ready to go right then. This is just so you don't go spend all your money at once. You will have time to pace yourself, and not take such a big chunk of money out of your pocket.
As far as the # you need. Wyoming is alot closer to Quebec than Georgia. I don't know. Here when we extract. The supers are only off the hive for a day or three. As soon as we are done the super goes right back on the hive. You do need spares, but not for every hive. If you only had 10 hives that would meen you'd have to have 60 to 80 boxes. Thats alot. Here we run 3 med. on our hives. Once they are full we extract.
BB
[This message has been edited by BILLY BOB (edited September 10, 2003).]
How many?Depends on whether your average crop is 200 pounds or 50 pounds.In general the farther north the bigger the crop,the more supers.Here,3 mediums or 2 deeps will be enough,but in a normal year we would extract twice.
>>How many?Depends on whether your average crop is 200 pounds or 50 pounds.
Around here, it is easy to harvest 200 pounds. A friend of mine even got an average of 385 pounds per hive last year with his 40 hives.
Hugo
As mentioned above it depends also on how many hives you have because you only need a few spares, but with 200 pound harvests you'd have three deeps for brood and three deeps for supers. I often have hives this tall. Again, it depends on if you want to harvest onces or twice or three times. And it depends on how high you want to lift a deep super full of honey. I vote for one inch, but if you have a hive that is six deep boxes high it will be more like five feet. Harvesting more often will help to keep the hive shorter and require less boxes.
>>Harvesting more often will help to keep the hive shorter and require less boxes.
>>Harvesting more often will help to keep the hive shorter and require less boxes.
You mean if you extract them at the moment you take the boxes out of the hive, and place it back ASAP ? I suppose that if you want to do only few extractions, you will need more boxes to replace the filled one you are waiting to extract...
Hugo