Please connect the dots by stating which of his books and/or lectures you have read.
I did not understand the methods he used even after reading his books. You would think that after keeping bees for 47 years I would be able to read and immediately grasp the concepts. Talking with a beekeeper in Germany who uses his methods quickly showed where I was missing major points.
His book Beekeeping at Buckfast Abbey comes closest to describing the physical methods. Here are a few of the points that I found interesting.
He used a square hive body for a multitude of reasons such as being able to rotate the supers 90 degrees during a flow. This may not sound important, but the bees tend to position themselves on one side or the other of the brood chamber and they tend to store honey immediately above the brood nest. If the brood frames and super frames are aligned, this results in supers with only half the frames full of honey. Rotate those supers 90 degrees and the bees will move across and fill all of the frames with honey.
He did not fill the brood chamber up with frames. Instead, he left enough frames during winter for the cluster to cover then added frames during the spring expansion until he had the number of frames the queen could fill with eggs. The brood chamber was almost never full of frames. Winter organization was typically 3 to 5 frames with bees and honey and a follower board. This has several important effects on colony organization such as pushing field bees to the side of the brood chamber where they cluster. This cluster space is unique to the 12 frame Dadant hive and his methods of management. The effect is to push incoming nectar into the supers and decongest the brood nest. This significantly reduces swarming tendency.
He studied wintering under conditions where it was crucial to bees development. If you read carefully about his choices of breeding material, you will find that he valued good wintering traits highly. This was the sole reason he rejected several races of bees for breeding. An example is A. M. Major Nova. He tested wintering in insulated hives with the old style caps made with two layers of wood with either sawdust or leaves between the layers. Place a cap over 4 colonies and the worst of winter's cold would presumably be kept out and the bees would be warmer. What did he find? That the bees do not heat the hive, however, hive conditions have a major impact on behavior of the bees. A hive that was heavily insulated did not warm up enough on marginal days to enable cleansing flights. Bees in plain wooden boxes under the same conditions warmed up enough to take brief flights and as a result came through winter in much better condition.
What about moisture? Wintering bees release large amounts of water that can condense on the hive roof and drip back down on the bees. He recognized that bees release most of the moisture during spring brood rearing. By leaving only enough frames for the cluster to cover, with a naturally quiescent strain of bee, and by using appropriate roofing and hive construction, he was able to keep moisture to a minimum during the colder parts of winter.
He used queen excluders. This surprised me until I figured out that his management methods strongly favor bees moving into the supers at the earliest opportunity. Confining the queen to the brood chamber has a number of positive effects. Honey is stored above the brood which reduces brood nest congestion and reduces swarming. The queen is kept on brood frames that match her laying ability. Honey is extracted from clean frames which means it does not darken from brood cocoons.
His management methods are the art of sliding. This one surprised me a great deal. With a big enough brood chamber, the frames no longer have to be lifted out of the box. He slid the frames to one side, removed or otherwise manipulated only the frame(s) that needed attention, then slid the frames back together.
