# Two queen hive - Make their own queen?



## Beeophyte (Oct 17, 2011)

Good question! That is a pretty rare situation. It kind of makes me want to set up an experiment just to see what happens.


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## FlowerPlanter (Aug 3, 2011)

I bet you can trick them by placing a divider in the hive like they do for queen rearing.

Or you can always spit the hive for abit while you wait for the new queen to get raised/mated.


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## Acebird (Mar 17, 2011)

The divider is already there being that there are two separate brood chambers but common honey supers. I am surprised there are not battles with this tower arrangement fighting over whose honey it is.


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## Lauri (Feb 1, 2012)

That is exactly what I am going to do next fall-overwinter multaple queens in hive condos with common chamber above..Just found a hive that is queenless in todays inspections. Wish it had been a two queen hive. 

Hows this for a condo? LOL That would be bold to try, but why not? If you find a section that ends up queenless, just take out a divider. Might end up with a lot of fall mated queens for spring needs.


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## 100 td (Apr 3, 2011)

So can you run a 2 queen hive with queen & brood in bottom box, then excluder on top with queen & brood in second box then excluder and honey super on top?


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## Michael Palmer (Dec 29, 2006)

Are you talking about side by side two queen hive? i've run double nuc boxes with excluder on both and super on top. If one side goes queenless, they won't raise another queen...the other side has one and they'er really just one colony.


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## Lauri (Feb 1, 2012)

Exactly. But maybe also a larger scale
(These are photos of a queen mating nuc combo box, but I made it for overwintering multaple colonies too)
Sounds like a mess when you put it in print
Heres an example. I can remove some of these dividers and make this a three hive combo.I built it so three regular Langstroth box's will fit and break right over the remaining dividers. So three colonies side by side in the thick deep lower combo box (Made out of 1 1/2" thick material) 
Then secnod story, three 10 frame deeps with frames of feed
then queen excluders, then combo section (Like the one over the feed jars in lower photo) for bees to access patties, sugar and mingle/equalize
then top cover



























I plan to also make one similar to house several 5 frame nucs instead of ten frame colonies shown here
If I thought I would need to move it, I would just install it on a pallet and get my trusty friend-Mr. Kubota


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## Ted Kretschmann (Feb 2, 2011)

But I have run into a rare situation-Mother/Daughter combinations. For some strange reason the bees kept the original queen around along with the new daughter queen. I have seen Momma on one side of the frame with the daughter on the other side of the frame. Both laying up a storm. Both are productive queens in charge of a super strong colony. I have seen this several times in my career. While a beekeeper will not see it often, it maybe a little more common behavior and occurance than we realize. And Ace in man made two queen systems, when one hive in the system goes queenless, it will not replace the queen in the queenless half. I run nucs like this sometimes and hives on pallets that are side by side. This is the only time excluders are worth anything. TED


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## Lauri (Feb 1, 2012)

Ted, I have already run into that and I agree. You might be interested in this thread I posted a while ago. It is a newbeekeepers story-sorry 
http://www.beesource.com/forums/sho...-walk-away-queen-rearing-pics-and-experiments

Especially fall raised and late mated daughter queens may very well be more common than we think and accepted in the hive with mother though out the winter months.


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## Ted Kretschmann (Feb 2, 2011)

Agreed, but I run into this also in the middle of Summer. So I believe this occurance/behaviour is a little more common than beekeepers realize. Since I work up to 150 colonies a day, I have more opportunity than most to see "quirky" "beehaviour". Lauri, how long did the combination of mother/daughter last in your hive? And I have always wondered if certain strains of bees are more apt to have such a natural combination. TED


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## MattDavey (Dec 16, 2011)

Recently we took a frame of brood and the queen from a 5 frame Nuc to use in a Trapout. The remaining 4 frames we combined with the hive next to the Nuc by using a queen excluder.and placing the frames in a box above it. A few days later there were 10 queen cells in the top box above the excluder. So I can confirm they are likely to start queen cells. Bees don't like going through an excluder if they don't have to. So if you have an entrance on either side of the excluder I would say the side without a queen is very likely to raise a new one.


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## Acebird (Mar 17, 2011)

That is one on top of the other not side by side with a common honey area.

So if you have a two queen tower system and one side goes queenless what do you do?


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## Joel (Mar 3, 2005)

We ran 150 of our 300 hives in 2 queen units last year. Have run this set up for about 15 years. We use the methodolgy laid out in "The Hive and the Honey Bee" as it has a powers study behind it. In this scenerio - the tower - the queens are only in the same hive for about 30 days total if you include release and combine time. What we've found is even with a queen exculder, 4 honey supers and a 2 queen board, neither unit is likely to requeen if a queen is lost. Not sure why other than the large population of workers possibly exchanging phermones.

If one unit goes queenless we requeen the hive immediately with a purchased queen. Since everything on 2 queens for production is aimed at peaking a hive population at the peak of the main honey flow the window to have both units fully "staffed" is too small and would exclude them raising there own queen, even from a mature queen cell.

It has been a very successful, albeit labor intensive, management practice for us. For production purposes I'm not certain why one would leave a queen in longer than a brood cycle?


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## BeeCurious (Aug 7, 2007)

Acebird said:


> So if you have a two queen tower system and one side goes queenless what do you do?


I've only had bees since 2008 so I'm certainly not an authority, but I have two solutions in mind for a "semi-queenless" tower hive.

1. Introduce a queen (in cage) with a frame of open brood.

2. Switch queenless broodnest with a queenright broodnest. Possibly using newspaper for the combination. 

I believe that one if the above solutions is better than the other, although part of the cure may not be required ...

I may set up one of these this year to play with...


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## Acebird (Mar 17, 2011)

I think if I were to discover one of the two queen hives went queenless I would just separate the hives and let the queenless hive make a new queen. I don't know how you would know this without digging into the hives and checking for the queens all the time.

What is the likelihood that one side would ever do a supercedure. Seems to me they never would.


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## BeeCurious (Aug 7, 2007)

> I don't know how you would know this without digging into the hives and checking for the queens all the time.


Perhaps less pollen would be carried into one of the sides.


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## Acebird (Mar 17, 2011)

That is an interesting thought. Do you think that certain bees are assigned certain task like collecting honey vs. collecting pollen? When the one side goes queenless those bees would not collect the pollen for the other side or they would use the other entrance. That would suggest they would use the other entrance for honey collection also? What do you think would happen if there was an upper entrance?


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## Michael Palmer (Dec 29, 2006)

Ted, in 2004 I was doing some requeening...50 from Chapleau in Quebec. Set up nucs on top of the hive to be requeened..isolated above inner cover..and united three weeks later. 30% - 17/50 had multiple queens in the bottom queenright unit when I united them. Two and sometimes three queens...saw two fat daughters laying on the same frame, mamma on the next one over.


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## Michael Palmer (Dec 29, 2006)

Ted Kretschmann said:


> Agreed, but I run into this also in the middle of Summer. So I believe this occurance/behaviour is a little more common than beekeepers realize. TED


I too think it happens fairly often. Beekeepers I know in the UK look for this kind of stock, look at multiple queen colonies as a gift, and select for the trait.


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## Michael Palmer (Dec 29, 2006)

MattDavey said:


> Bees don't like going through an excluder if they don't have to. So if you have an entrance on either side of the excluder I would say the side without a queen is very likely to raise a new one.


MD, I've seen this setup in my nucleus colonies often enough to think...more likely than not, two nucleus colonies with side entrances and excluder with all bees able to go into the super won't raise a new queen if one side goes queenless.


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## hoodswoods (May 15, 2009)

My double-queened hive (one marked yellow, the other red) was my biggest and most productive hive last year - the requeened split I made from that is doing much better than they this winter.


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## MattDavey (Dec 16, 2011)

I should remember not to assume! (Because it makes an ASS out of U and ME )

I should have also given more detail. i was thinking you were talking about a Long hive at least 20 frames long, with a vertical excluder in the center.

With entrances at either end, furtherest away from each other, with distinctly separate brood nests, separated by at least several inches or frames of capped honey, I believe they will usually raise a new queen. (Based on my little experience and what I've read).

I think the key here is the "distinctly separate brood nests, separated by at least several inches or frames of capped honey" because I think if enough queen substance is getting from one brood nest to the other other, the side without a queen will not feel the need to raise a new queen. The queen substance needs to get diluted enough by the time it gets to the the next brood nest.

Michael, I agree. If you have a 10 frame super on top of two 5 frame Nucs I think the brood nests are too close together, even though they are separated by the walls of the nucs and the excluder. The population is probably not big enough for the queen substance to get diluted enough by the time it gets to the the next brood nest. 

Matthew Davey


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## Acebird (Mar 17, 2011)

Matt, this is the system I am thinking of but I only have 8 frame boxes. Is that too small of a separation? I suppose I could put them end to end but that would defeat the ability to get the outside frames out.


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## Acebird (Mar 17, 2011)

OK another idea...
Separate the bottom two brood chambers by two or more frame spaces. A decision would have to be made to either leave that section of the QE open as another entrance or close it up. I can see where it would be great ventilation for drying the honey but on the other hand might just be fair game for robbing. I don't know how well it would be defended.


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## MattDavey (Dec 16, 2011)

Acebird: If your using 8 frame boxes, I would make a 3x8 frame long hive. (That's actually 26 frames.) I made one over 15 years ago and it worked well. (Only thing was the hive swarmed and the next generation was HOT! Chasing people walking around the back yard. That's why I stopped beekeeping until a few years ago.)

I now use 10 frame boxes and I've just about finished making a 2x10 frame long hive (which is actually 21 frames). I've since decided to run it as a two queen hive. It probably won't be long enough with only 10 frames for each broodnest, so they'll have to be 2 x two storey broodnests.

With your current set up, (I think you're saying brood box, excluder, super, brood box), if you have another empty super, I would put the empty super under the top brood nest with the queen excluder directly under the top broodnest (excluder on top of the empty super). With the top broodnest being queenless.

If you're worried that a virgin queen might get through the excluder, you could put fly screen mesh over it, cut to size. Then have a top entrance for the top broodnest, facing the OPPOSITE direction to the bottom one. (So that a virgin queen does not go into the bottom entrance.) The top entrance should be small so that they can defend it. (As you may loose a lot of the foragers to the bottom box.) For the entrance, may be just as easy to drill a half inch hole, or open up a vent hole in one side of the roof.

Matthew Davey


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