Re: "lier or a fool"
Walt and all, thanks for the replies.
The standard management over here in Germany is to remove all empty (brood) combs and restrict the bees onto the combs that are covered with bees. This can be 5-7 deep frames. This usually is in March, so pretty early. This way the bees are compacted and this helps warming in the sometimes very cold late spells we have.
All excess food combs (thus syrup) gets removed and is tucked away for making splits later. Bees are forced to eat up the food dome on the combs they sit on. (No stores can be moved closer to the broodnest. Bees move stores around in Spring, closer to the broodnest.)
As soon as the bees are out foraging for their first pollen, the hive gets supered. The experts here super with a shallow containing three to four drawn but empty combs in the center, the rest filled up with foundations.
(Beekeepers here do not want to extract honey from former broodnest combs, why they rather let the bees build fresh comb above the excluder. Also most beekeepers pay close attention not to mix up winter feed with the fresh honey.)
Being compacted on few combs, the bees readily take the super and start storing the nectar there, the first batch of young bees start working the foundation quickly and within a week (first white wax on topbars can be found at beginning of May) the super is drawn, immediately supered with another super. But this time a queen excluder in between. Again: center combs empty drawn comb and filled up with foundation. This is repeated up to four supers. (Shallows. Less with deeper frames.) With Buckfast bees the supers are just put on top. While with Carnolians it is necessary to put the new supers under the already filled super in order to prevent backflooding, because Carnolians store nectar close to the broodnest, no matter what.
In mid May and mid June some frames of brood are taken to make small splits and dampen the exploding increase of the hive population a little. Winter food combs, that has been taken before, are used for making the splits.
The goal is to get the bees into an upward motion. Just as I understand you do with checkerboarding. Keeping the broodnest free from backflooding.
That described management does delay swarming for quite a long time. One month or so. Natural swarming occurs end of May here, right after the first main flow at start of May. Next main flow is mid June and beginning of July.
So if I understand checkerboarding right, it achieves the same goal: breaking up the honey/food dome and getting the bees into an upward motion. ("Up into the sky" a friend of mine says.)
Anyway, cut-off date seems to be 21st of June, which is the summer soltice. Until then it is almost impossible to prevent the broodnest from backflooding, no matter what you do. Even if you delay swarming a little at mid June the bees try to swarm. Most beekeepers here remove the old queen and replace her with a young one 18 days later. Breaking cells two times in a 9 day intervall. Which breaks any swarm tendency for 100 %.
This is the golden standard:
- compact broodnest in March
- super in April
- keep supering as supers get filled
- one or two brood frame split in mid May
- requeen in June, breaking cells two times per hive.
It is not too much work. I also tend to requeen in mid May already, right when the colonies start to crowd, with some sort of "on the spot queen rearing" in distant non-migratory apiaries, which works great and is even less work. (Visit one time to remove the queen, another time seven days later to break all cells except one. That's it. It sure means some honey loss. But not significantly.)
The golden standard works with all sorts of (vertically oriented) hives.
The question that remains for me is, if you really can increase the broodnest significantly, since some bee scientists found out a close relationship between outside daily maximum temperature and egg. From my observation I can verify this.
From what I observed so far, swarming preparation starts when bees:brood-ratio starts to drop below 120 % after the first increase in early Spring. I compared it to the description of the checkerboarding dates and it pretty much matches.
In early Spring the broodnest expands and the winter bees care for the brood. The ratio bees to brood is 1 to 4 or even 1 to 6. So one nurse bee is caring for a many broodcells and larvae. The broodnest expands more and more. The first young bees emerge and take of the nursing. At a certain point the ratio between bees and brood is converging again = 1:5 > 1:4 > 1:3 and so on. Until it drops below 150 %. This is the time when queen cells appear.
I reckon this is due to the "smell" (hormons released by the larvae and distributed in the hive and between bees). Means the bees notice that there are more than enough bees to split up/swarm and still they can care for the brood. (One bee can nurse multiple brood cells.) The whole nest smells like brood in early Spring. Pollen intake is immense. Once the nest is full of emerged bees, the nest smells different, maybe in human terms "ripe".
I did some experiments this year with artificially keeping the ratio between bees and brood above 150 %, so I provided lots of fresh brood and took bees from the hives by shaking in order to keep up the ratio. Hives didn't swarm.
I wonder how this matches with checkerboarding. Maybe the broodnest expansion by checkerboarding keeps up the ratio.
Just thoughts, sorry for the long post.