Brother adams hive

[Norton]

It's not me that is saying it - it is the numerous studies done by prominent bee scientists at labs and universities that give us facts and figures and they are correct.

A single Langstoth brood chamber is ample for a good queen. Why give them 20 frames to spread the brood out?

We only use single brood chambers with an excluder and then 3/4 depth supers. We use the excluders to a) stop the queens laying in our nice white super frames. b) so that when we go along the hives pulling the supers we don't have to sort through frames with brood etc. We pull full supers of honey. c) The white super combs do not need any kind of treatment in storage.
In the past 35 years we have tried double brood chambers, one and a 3/4 but find that the single gives the best results and this has been confirmed by comparative tests carried out in Israel.

Best regards
Norton.

 

[Finman]

.
What is situation of the brood?


I use 3 brood box because I do not use excluder. For heavy flow I keep tte main entrance wide open


1) ---> the lowest box has no brood because it is cool. It has mostly
pollen.Nectar rippens too in there and bees lift it up later.

2) ---> the second brood box have full bfrood frames except towards the wall.
In peripheria frames are filled with honey and lots pollen

3) ----> The third box has honey, pollen and brood. It has often the early yield which the hives foraged when they were half size in early summer. So I need to lift that up that I may extract that honey. Lifting gives again room to lay.


With this system the queen do not raise up to lay in supers. But it makes drone cells where ever thay have proper space.

 

[Finman]

In the past 35 years we have tried double brood chambers, one and a 3/4 but find that the single gives the best results and this has been confirmed by comparative tests carried out in Israel.

Best regards
Norton.

What is that best results? What it in there?

 

[Norton]

Once the brood chamber is full of brood, honey and pollen any incoming nectar is pushed up above the excluder into the supers, where it belongs.
By best results I mean the highest honey production was achieved in single brood chamber hives when compared to the double brood chamber system.
If you have frames in the super that are foundation then a large number of worker bees go up into the supers to build comb, ripen honey etc and this relieves a lot of the congestion in the brood chamber and is is actually a swarm control measure. If you read Brother Adam's books you will discover that in some years all his supers were just foundation and not build combs.............
Best regards
Norton

 

[Finman]

.
I cannot understand how Brother Adam can be right in every case.
Adams have made too much candles if he had only foundations.

My neighbour beekeeper and me we nurser bees very different way.
He keeps queen in one box under excluder and my queens may walk freely.
And many other things.

Our hives are about same size towers. Genepool may be nearly same because they mate in same areas.

When we compare our yields, they are quite same during 30 years what we have lived together. What is common to us is landscape and weather.

BUt I have found that pastures are above all. When I have same size of hives and they are only 5 km apart each other, one point may give 3 times bigger yield than another place.

*********

Once I got average yield 130 kg per hive. I was really proud of my Carniolans.
Then I talked with another beek 15 km away, he got the same. I asked what kind of bees he has?

- "They are some crossings. I have not breeded them for 10 years. They make their own queens."


Then I undestood that the yield comes from flowers, not from bees.

.

 

[Norton]

So the carniolians weren't so great after all!

 

[Finman]

So the carniolians weren't so great after all!

I gove up. I could not stand their swarming.

 

[Norton]

Yes I know!

 

[hedgerow pete]

i see that there quite a few other people who have come to the same ideas as me that double broods are not quite needed, especialy for my mongrel bees.

i must admit i like the single brood box and excluder method, it suits my bee keeping style whether its right or wrong.

i have noticed that someone like norton, who has at his dispossal a massive amount of queens to select from and uses.
he does not think it is necessary to use more than one brood box,amazing i was expecting him to need five!!

this fact completly blows away my ideas and facts for the new style bee hive in the linked thread

i must admit at 78,000 cells, my lot are happy enough in one brood box , and i have noticed that much of the hype on the newer hybred super bees has died down to very little, maybe it was just hype and hot air rather than cold facts, but thats not to say i am wrong and others are right

at 78,000 cells in a 12 by 14 she would have to be doing 2,600 eggs a day to fill it, thats a roughly an egg every 30 seconds with no sleep or time to put her feet up for coffee and eastenders.

i cant see mine doing half of that count in a day .

so it looks as if the four foot cubic hive with built in crane to lift the metre square frames is going to wait a while.

all said and done, i do think that as bees are breed and improved we will come to a point where the old designs of hives are going to be replaced with a new design that better suits the new queens

 

[Finman]

.
When englishmen use an open mesh floor, I wonder how full are combs those brood cells. In there there are xxxxx cells but how much in practice.

 

[tonybloke]

not all of us use mesh floors !! my hives have approx 70,500 possible brood cells in single box.

 

[Finman]

not all of us use mesh floors !! my hives have approx 70,500 possible brood cells in single box.

According my experience, they are not all possible. If half of frame area is brood, it is good.

Brood area is a ball, not a cubic.

 

[Somerford]

For once I am in 100% agreement with Finman

It is all about the forage, and a bigger hive helps the bees if they have access to more forage as I am a firm believer that more pollen stimulates the queen to over produce eggs if she has the room.

It's all about LOCATION LOCATION LOCATION !!!

Regards

S

 

[johnandyrob]

Im looking for a new out apiary do you think Phil and Kirsty will give me a hand

 

[Somerford]

try them !!

LMAO

S

 

[Finman]

In two brood system it is important that you change the places of boxes.
So the brood comb get old evenly. If they are allways in same place, half of comb may be dark and half very light colow and unused.

In spring there are winter food too in combs and it must be recycled. Later on summer, move the winterfood frames in the middle of brood area and it will be clean some days later and full of larvae.

I keep oldest combs in the center. When they are too old, I lift them up as super. Bees eate pollen away, they fill it with honeys and after extraction I melt the comb.

Once I kept light color in the brood area centre, One day it happened that my all brood combs were too old.

When I let them draw new combs in supers boxes during heavy flow, I have always all age combs to give to expanding hives.

 

[Scutellator]

Hello,
The use of a double brood box is unnecessary - singles (Langstroth) supply all the room needed. Studies have shown that the maximum amount of brood is only the equivalent of five full sized Langstoth frames.

I always tell to the bees that. I always tell them, that according the scientist they should not be able to lay in more than 7 langstroth frames. But they just won't listen, so i gave up and i added another brood chamber.

The most fertile queen i've seen was able to maintain 18 dadant frames (i know how it sounds) from May till July in two consecutive years and then she suddenly died at the middle of the summer. That was many years ago. The queen belonged to bright yellow italian line and despite the amount of brood the hive was not so populous as one could expect to be. I still have (but don't use it anymore) the hive wich i build specially for this queen (actually for it's mother, who were also very prolific).


What Br. Adam is saying about queen ferlitity?

A queen which in the period from the end of May until the end of July cannot maintain with brood , nine to ten Dadant combs (46 x 27 cm) does not come up to our standards.

- I totaly agree.

In his words an egg layng rate of 3000 eggs per day is "moderate", and he consider it as the optimum.



I don't see reason why the most fertile queen shoud not be able to lay 1/10th of the most fertile ant (the african termite).

 

[Hivemaker.]

I had a queen like this once,she layed over 5000 eggs a day,and lived for six years,athough she was not a good layer in her last year,only managed 2000 eggs a day...and she had no wings for the last two years of her life.I miss that queen...

 

[Hivemaker.]

She went broody in the end,and never layed another EGG....so i squat her.

 

[Scutellator]

I had a queen like this once,she layed over 5000 eggs a day,and lived for six years,athough she was not a good layer in her last year,only managed 2000 eggs a day...and she had no wings for the last two years of her life.I miss that queen...

You are joking with me, aren't you?
The most prolific queens i've seen rarely live up to 24 months. They can be used only one year for honey production.

But despite of that, everything else sounds logically consistent.