- Hey there!
We're here today to talk about single brood chamber colony management.
We got into doing this 20, 25 years ago, something like that.
It was common in one area of Ontario, but everyone else in Ontario kept double brood
chamber hives.
I got to know one beekeeper in that area, named Barry Davis, became a mentor of mine,
great beekeeper, really good guy.
And in a way he talked me into singles but he was trying not to because he'd given up
on trying to talk people into single brood chambers, so I had to pry some of this information
out of him.
We've been doing it for a long time and really like managing colonies in just one box.
Simplifies a lot of things.
We're gonna go through some of the advantages, some of the disadvantages.
We've got a double here just to be able to compare, and we'll talk through what happens
through the season with this.
So with the single brood chamber hives we get through the winter and in the spring in
the year, once they build up in strength we add a honey super.
Now that honey super is added a little bit earlier than you would add honey supers to
other colonies, 'cause we're not just putting the honey super on there for space to store
honey, we're giving the bees space to expand and they're less confined if they can move
up into the honey super or even supers.
This hive's ready for a super.
When they get to between eight and ten frames of bees, as you can see there we got about
nine frames of bees in there, then it's time to add a super.
A single brood chamber management requires the use of a queen excluder.
It's mandatory.
So that goes on right above the brood chamber.
Set that on and then we add our honey super on top of that.
Pretty simple so far.
Close up the hive and walk away.
We'll come back a little bit later and check on the supers and add our space as need be.
But again, this space here gives the bees room to expand, so there's less congestion
and less chance of swarming behavior.
When it comes to inspecting a colony that's a single brood chamber hive we have ten frames
of bees to look through so it's easy to find queens, it's easier to inspect for diseases,
and any disease treatments used are cheaper and more easily placed.
Most control measures require you double the amount of materials used in a double brood
chamber.
So that's twice the cost.
So that's some of the advantages.
Another advantage, if I want to pick up a single beehive and move it, I can do so, all
by myself, I don't need to drag in a friend or a spouse or whatever to help me out.
You can just pick them up and move them and we'll get the super back on there.
This double brood chamber hive you see beside here sometimes we manage hives in two brood
chambers and that's typically if we've had a hive that's not doing very well.
We'll add it on top of a hive that is doing well and then we have a double brood chamber
hive.
But that's just a temporary situation because later on we'll be moving that, splitting that
hive off.
And you could see our video on splitting colonies to see how that's done.
But when we manage a double brood chamber hive a disadvantage of that is every time
we need to find a queen or to do disease inspection, or just a normal colony inspection, you have
to separate the two brood chambers.
Which means you have to pry off this box.
It's usually glued down pretty good.
So pry it up, pry down the bottom frame, they enter there, and then lift this big heavy
box off and set it down way down here on the ground.
It's a little effort.
And then you go through one brood chamber to inspect it and then you go through the
other brood chambers and inspect it.
So you can that adds some difficulties there.
More advantages with the single here.
The single brood chamber colony stores the bulk of their honey in the honey supers.
They do store some in the brood chamber but you get more honey production from a single
brood chamber hives.
'Cause more of it is put up into the honey supers.
They still, the queen still have lots of room to lay in here.
The queen can't lay in more cells than there is available in a single brood chamber hive.
So the super, the honey that's in the supers here, this first one acts sort of like an
extension of the brood chamber.
It's honey in, honey out, as the bees need food it's like the first cupboard they can
reach into to grab food.
So that honey comes in the spring will often be consumed as they need it down the brood
chamber.
Bees move honey around a lot.
They'll move it up from the brood chamber into the honey super or back down again as
required.
Now, soon we'll be adding more supers on to this top of this colony in about another two
or three weeks.
When it comes to the end of the year, we go right back down to the single brood chamber
hive and we feed the hive and get it ready for winter.
One, some of the differences in managing single brood chamber hives is one thing we have to
do is as soon as we take that honey off the hive, you need to feed immediately because
there may not be much honey in the brood chamber.
So that's one difference between managing singles and doubles.
Is that timing, being more important to get that feed on.
Another thing that we have to consider is that through the summer time if we're harvesting
honey mid summer we can't strip off all the honey because there may not be much in the
brood chambers.
So we usually leave this bottom box in place in the midsummer harvest.
We've learned that kind of the hard way, that sometimes we do have conditions that are not
so good mid to late summer and we need to leave them a little bit of food in place.
Come winter, once the supers are all off, and the hives are fed, we wrap them up and
it is possible to get a single brood chamber hive through the winter in Ontario here.
So it's possible to do that in many other jurisdictions as well.
I'd recommend like any other thing new that you try, try just a little bit at first, a
hive or two, see what you think, see if it works for you, before you commit a whole hog
to it.
Thanks for watching, see you another time.