# Single Brood Chamber?



## Fusion_power (Jan 14, 2005)

It can work if you use the right bees. Straight Italians brood too much. Carniolans are conservative enough to make it. The key is to have enough frames of stores in the fall to ensure overwintering, then feed in the spring as needed to build a strong colony for the flow. This leads to heavy swarming which has to be managed by splitting for increase.

So to answer your question, single brood chamber works, but requires significant changes to management methods.


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## beepro (Dec 31, 2012)

It works for me because I can actively manage the Italians through out the 
4 seasons. Tried that over here last season with very good result. One hive in 3 deep can
be split into 6 nuc hives to overwinter. Screen name Crazy Roland here use it. Maybe you can
PM him or search for his threads. I'll try to perfect his method this coming season to learn more with
60 drawn comb dedicated for that. Let me know when you find out more about it.


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## Cuttingedgelandinc (Mar 3, 2015)

Fusion_power said:


> It can work if you use the right bees. Straight Italians brood too much. Carniolans are conservative enough to make it. The key is to have enough frames of stores in the fall to ensure overwintering, then feed in the spring as needed to build a strong colony for the flow. This leads to heavy swarming which has to be managed by splitting for increase.
> 
> So to answer your question, single brood chamber works, but requires significant changes to management methods.


This is my first year trying it. One of the colonies is from a swarm from my Apiary.
I also have three others that were started as splits from other colonies and I added our Mated queens. I made sure that they were very heavy going into the fall and fed them candy early on. Out of the three, one of them has already eaten through about 5 pounds of candy. A few days ago, I added another round of candy to them each receiving approximately 8 pounds. As long as they continue to eat this and the weather cooperates, I will continue to give them more.
They are also VERY heavily insulated. We shall see how it goes. Hopefully at least 50% make it. I would really like to try managing them as singles again next season.


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## Nhaupt2 (May 31, 2016)

I watched the same video and was wondering about this as well. his math makes sence, but I have never had queens lay all the way to the outside edges of my brood boxes either, so the numbers may be a little optomistic. I wonder if that's because I always provide space for them to move up into another brood box. it sure would make inspections easier to only have to go through one box, as well as save some resources to make more colonies with. it seems like the tradeoff would be that you really have to stay on the lookout for swarm preparations. 
He also talks about slamming a ton of sugar syrup into them for the winter. I have always been told that empty comb space is essential for temperature regulation in the cluster. if your filling every cell with syrup that's not going to exist. 
I think the single brood chamber is more prevalent in Canada and commercial operations then it is here in the states and among backyard keepers. I would love to hear some experienced opinions on the differences In managing style and overwintering success for people who have winters of at least 5b.


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## thesecurityeagle (Jun 21, 2016)

I plan to try this on a single colony this year to see what my experiences are. In the spring, I will sacrifice a production 20 frame colony and split to two ten frame single boxes. I like the idea of having only ten frames to deal with. My suspicion is that I loose a good bit of honey to the deeps where the girls store it away in the outside frames. It will take a few years of trying it to see what the pros and cons are but yes, I am looking to do just that.


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## grozzie2 (Jun 3, 2011)

At the recent British Columbia Honey Producers AGM, we had two presenters discuss variations on this topic. First up was Ian Steppler, and second up was Randy Oliver. Both emphasized the math of how a queen only needs 6.5 brood frames, except possibly for an exceptional queen during max build up period. Ian's presentation was very well done, and clearly showed the how and why of organizing frames in each of the boxes, and how he lets the queen have free reign over the second box initially, but, shakes back down into singles some time later, possibly harvesting the brood in the second box as a nuc or split.

But the one big take-away from both presentations for me was this. If you confine the brood nest to a single box, it will be all brood nest. When you take the honey boxes off, you need to be right on top of feeding because flows are over, and you have left your bees in a box with no significant amount of food, ie, they are not going to have enough food for the winter in that box when honey comes off. For folks that have an aversion to feeding bees, or, it's one of those things that ends up on the 'round-to-it' list and doesn't get done for a few weeks, then confining to a single box and taking away all the honey boxes will likely end up with hungry bees that decline rapidly for a lack of food. Randy emphasized the importance of fall feeding, including protien suppliments to get well fed winter bees.

It was fascinating to compare the two approaches, both very different, but they have good reasons for the differing approaches. One is targetting a honey flow in mid to late summer, the other targetting spring bees for almond pollination.


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## thesecurityeagle (Jun 21, 2016)

Ian has mentioned this recently in conversation (I moderate where he is a moderator) and it was enough to get me looking at it. The feeding issue was brought up as well. Thanks for posting that part, the bees dwindle very quickly after the removal of the honey supers and he feeds to "Pack the nest" so they have plenty to last. One item in discussion is the window between pulling the last super in the fall and the on set of truly cold weather. In my part of the world its hot till its not (around November) then a week later it warms up again and then gets cold. This pattern persists until January/February when we see the warm days (80s) and cool nights. So there is some challenge here. This is one of the reasons I wanted to trial this method on one colony and see what the outcomes are. I am still very interested in the practice, if it works out it will certainly simplify the management.


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## AstroBee (Jan 3, 2003)

grozzie2 said:


> But the one big take-away from both presentations for me was this. If you confine the brood nest to a single box, it will be all brood nest. When you take the honey boxes off, you need to be right on top of feeding because flows are over, and you have left your bees in a box with no significant amount of food, ie, they are not going to have enough food for the winter in that box when honey comes off. For folks that have an aversion to feeding bees, or, it's one of those things that ends up on the 'round-to-it' list and doesn't get done for a few weeks, then confining to a single box and taking away all the honey boxes will likely end up with hungry bees that decline rapidly for a lack of food. Randy emphasized the importance of fall feeding, including protien suppliments to get well fed winter bees.


When I started beekeeping, I ran double deeps on everything. A few years into it, I experimented with single deeps, and much to my surprise, my yields were as good and often times much better than double deeps. How could you not like this! Well, its the feeding that matters, so for my situation (full-time job, and part-time beekeeper) the feeding was killing me. In our area, we get a pretty hard dearth about the first of June, making for a very tough 45 days until we get a little cotton nectar coming in. Robbing was more of an issue and dwindling was as well. For my location, feeding was absolutely essential. I ran this way for about 10 years, and then had to look for easier ways to manage my bees. I have now gone back to double deeps on nearly all colonies, simply because it requires less work. 

When I retire from my day job, I might go back to singles, but for now I've found a good balance between effort and yield that matches my commitments.


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## beepro (Dec 31, 2012)

Nhaupt2 said:


> ....his math makes sence, but I have never had queens lay all the way to the outside edges of my brood boxes either, so the numbers may be a little optomistic. I wonder if that's because I always provide space for them to move up into another brood box....


You will know when you try it out this coming season. Now to think of it why they're filling the frames with so much pollen? Too many broods all the way to the edge and too many bees.


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## Butler101 (May 13, 2017)

Also check out the University of Guelph Bee program on YouTube


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## grozzie2 (Jun 3, 2011)

AstroBee said:


> When I started beekeeping, I ran double deeps on everything. A few years into it, I experimented with single deeps, and much to my surprise, my yields were as good and often times much better than double deeps. How could you not like this! Well, its the feeding that matters, so for my situation (full-time job, and part-time beekeeper) the feeding was killing me.


One of the interesting slides we saw during the presentations regarding this more intensive management methodology was Randy's photo of 'most important piece of beekeeping equipment'. That was a photo of 2 people in rain gear, because when the bees need fed, they need fed, and it doesn't matter what the weather is doing that day. If beekeeping is the 'day job', then you gotta be on top of it, but, your time is dedicated to managing those bees. But if beekeeping is a secondary thing, or a hobby, there will be plenty of times where 'tend the bees' gets set on the back burner, so it's important to leave them in a configuration that allows for 'when I get round-to-it' schedules.


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## Specialkayme (Sep 4, 2005)

I ran doubles and 1.5's for a few years. With my doubles, I began noticing that the bees did one of two things: they either kept most of their brood in the bottom box, filling the top box with honey, or; they moved their brood up to the top box, and left the bottom box mostly empty. If the honey was in the top box, it was more or less a waste for me. I don't extract deep frames (I don't like extracting deeps in the extractor I have, plus I have alot of blowouts with deeps, plus I don't like to extract honey from frames larvae have been raised in, if it can be avoided), and it involved me moving heavy deeps whenever I needed to do an inspection. The honey was usually lost too, as the summer dearth hits the bees eat it all. If the bees were in the top box, I was wasting a box of drawn comb that could have been used somewhere else. But at the time, I more or less thought it was the way things were.

Then I read a few of Randy's articles, where he showed several studies that outlined you're looking at ~6 frames of brood, max (http://scientificbeekeeping.com/understanding-colony-buildup-and-decline-part-4/) and how the bees really prefer to keep a colony that is 10 frames of bees (http://scientificbeekeeping.com/understanding-colony-buildup-and-decline-part-12/). The two points were a rather large revaluation for me.

So about two years ago I started operating singles. I found that the bees actually swarmed less. I don't know why, and it's probably anecdotal evidence. I've also noticed an increase in my honey yield, again probably anecdotal evidence.

But the risks are three fold: one, as Grozzie pointed out, there ins't a whole lot of extra food in a single, and a colony can starve after you take the supers off. The solution is to either leave a super on for longer, or feed. Two, if you have a queen problem, the hive will quickly plug up the brood nest with pollen. I had it happen twice last year, and I had to pull out some frames of all pollen and figure out what to do with it (which may not be a problem really, if you can freeze it for the next spring for splits, but still). Three, splits become a little more involved. When I had doubles, I can take the top, put it on a new bottom board, add a cell to both and sit back. Splits on singles involve going through frames (which in actuality, I probably should have been doing anyway) to make sure they are equal in brood and bees.

I outlined some of my thoughts, strategies, and issues here: http://www.beesource.com/forums/sho...ons-for-managing-singles-for-honey-production


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## Ian (Jan 16, 2003)

grozzie2 said:


> One of the interesting slides we saw during the presentations regarding this more intensive management methodology was Randy's photo of 'most important piece of beekeeping equipment'. That was a photo of 2 people in rain gear, because when the bees need fed, they need fed, and it doesn't matter what the weather is doing that day. If beekeeping is the 'day job', then you gotta be on top of it, but, your time is dedicated to managing those bees. But if beekeeping is a secondary thing, or a hobby, there will be plenty of times where 'tend the bees' gets set on the back burner, so it's important to leave them in a configuration that allows for 'when I get round-to-it' schedules.


Iol! ... my guys hate when I pull the rain gear


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