- 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.
