This morning I sat in on two great presentations at the Tour de Hives workshop. The first was on grafting queens and queen-rearing, and though it was fascinating, I don't ever see myself wanting to get into the business of raising and selling queen bees. Even I have to draw the line somewhere! The second was by Les Crowder and was on keeping small TopBar hives--the equivalent of the Tiny House movement for bees. His current approach (evolved over decades of keeping bees) is to use TopBar hives, but to put two hives in on TopBar structure instead of one by separating them with a divider and giving them their own entrances. Kind of like a bee duplex. By keeping the hives small, the bees run out of space more quickly and make queen cells so they can swarm (an action that splits the hive with the old queen taking a bunch of young workers and flying off to start a new hive leaving a queen cell behind with a new queen soon to hatch for the remaining hive). After swarming, the bee population is down to roughly half its original size and the tiny hive is a fine size again.
Les doesn't let his bees swarm though. he lets them build queen cells on one side or the other of the bee duplex, and then he splits each of those two hives. He leaves two frames of capped brood, two frames of honey and pollen, a bunch or nurse bees, and the queen from each of the small hives in the small hive. All the rest of the frames from BOTH of the small hives are combined together with mostly forager bees in the new big hive. The frames from each of the small hives are alternated in the new hive and there is no queen--just one or more maturing queen larvae in queen cells. This new colony is also very strong because it has a ton of resources, a lot of field workers, and no queen laying eggs which need to be fed for about 10 ten days. So all the energy of the hive goes to making honey and you get a bump in your honey harvest from this split technique.
Another ancillary benefit to this kind of a split is that the break in the brood cycle of the hive also means a break in varroa mite cycle of the hive. Female adult mites don't have anywhere to lay their eggs in the new hive until the new queen has mated and started laying eggs so many mites don't get the chance to reproduce. I am unclear on whether there is a also a benefit in terms of varroa management to the original two hives as they both kept their queens, but it's still a good way to increase your number of hives.
At the end of Les' talk I was so motivated by him that I wanted to go home, get rid of all my hives that aren't TopBars. No more plastic frames, no more frames with wax that comes form who knows where. Nothing but beautiful foundationless frames and hives that I never have to lift or move again. Doesn't that sound sweet? It took me about an hour to come down off the Kool-aid enough to want to continue with my current experiment in hive and frame types for a few more years. I may yet go to all TopBar--they're cheap and easy to make, the bees like them, they are easy to manage--even for elderly and more frail beekeepers--but for now I'll keep my Langs, Flow, and Lang/TopBar hybrid.
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