Discussing Big Colonies with Anne (218)

Episode 218 – Discussing Big Colonies with Anne

Jim Tew: Honey Bee Obscura Podcast listeners, hi. Jim Tew back here with a special occasion for us. I've got Anne Frey back from Betterbee and we're going to sit here and we're going to discuss back and forth as she sees fit. The discussion I had last week, are big hives always the best hives? I don't want to hammer this point home, but I really hadn't finished with that last week. She's got some points I think are worthy of bringing up. Anne, welcome.

Anne Frey: Hi, Jim. It's good to be here.

Jim: As always, I'm happy to have you here. I know you take valuable company time from Betterbee to sit here. Thanks to you and Betterbee for allowing that to happen. Very welcome, always.

Anne: That's no problem. I was just recently at the expo and was really gratified to hear people coming up left and right and saying they heard my voice and they now can see what I look like. I was thinking, "What?" It's because of the podcast. I didn't realize that at first when they were saying these things. Podcasts, that's how we're getting famous.

Jim: [chuckles] I don't know that I want to be famous. I just want to have a good time to talk about bees and let life go. Let's run the intro and let's start this up.

Introduction: Welcome to Honeybee Obscura brought to you by Growing Planet Media, the producers of the Beekeeping Today podcast. Join Jim Tew, your guide through the complexities, the beauty, the fun, and the challenges of managing honeybees. Jim hosts fun and interesting guests who take a deep dive into the intricate world of honeybees. Whether you're a seasoned beekeeper or just getting started, get ready for some plain talk that'll delve into all things honeybees.

Jim: The whole reason that I'm trying to get you to chat with me about this today is that I have admitted to anybody who will listen and I had said it last week and I've said it in an article and so someone took time to write back that I mentioned my age a lot. What I said last week and I'd like to tell you is that a beekeeper's not a standard thing. It flexes. Beekeepers change as they age. When I was a younger guy, I wanted hundreds of hives and loaders. I wanted it all. Now as an older guy, I don't really want that. What I found out is that my bees still want to become king-size beehives.

What do you feel about bees and maybe three deeps and even some brood above that and maybe three supers on top of that? Is that a colony you enjoy working?

Anne: Jim, I think that might be a little bit excessive but not too excessive for some of our hives. It's more of a colony that I know is going to just deal with its own life on its own and I'm not going to have to check it. If they expand up through two or three deeps and then they need more space, there is empty space below them in that bottom deep by the time they need space and they'll creep back downwards again.

It's more typical for us to keep them in two deeps though. Three deeps is an unusual thing that might have happened because in the winter some hive died and we just whopped its honey box on top of another double-deep hive. In spring, they've got three. It's not really common though, but three supers or four supers, mediums is rather common for us up here in New York State.

Jim: As you were talking, I was thinking that it may be nothing more than I'm a sloppy beekeeper because what causes swarming primarily is brood nest crowding. If I happen to be stumbling through a really nice colony and it's already in two deeps, I think, "Well, it's going to swarm. It's going to be a nice swarm and this is a good queen and I've got her marked. I don't know where she is. I'll just put another deep on here. Then maybe I'll make a split or whatever." Then I don't, but I end up just trying to control swarming. To keep my bees in the box, I keep adding space to it till I get these big hives that are really hard to work.

Anne: Too tall

Jim: They're clumsy. I'm ashamed to say it, but when I go into my yard, you just look around for that small colony that you can open up with minimal smoke and they're not going to kill you for it. Importantly now, Anne, to me, is I don't have to move 100 pounds of honey to get to the brood nest just to check whatever.

Anne: Lots of people don't even care about harvesting any honey. If they're just a small family, they may need/want only 12 to 24 pounds of honey for an entire year. That's less than half of a super. They don't need all these stacked-up supers. They just want to be able to have fun with the bees and go out and observe the bees outside the hive and inside the hive. It's easy to take off one super and get to the brood chamber.

Jim: That's an easy segue into what I wanted to say. To the listeners there, if you're in the place in your beekeeping trip where you want mega colonies, 65,000, 70,000 deep honey supers, there is nothing wrong with that. It's very admirable. Yes, that colony for its size would be far more efficient than that colony thirded running three colonies like that. You're going to get more of a honey crop from it.

Anne: I was going to ask you what you meant by efficient and if you were just referring to efficiency of producing honey.

Jim: That is what I'm referring to.

Anne: Okay.

Jim: Where's that cutoff, Anne? If a colony is 16 feet tall, is it finally at its maximum efficiency? When does that increasing return finally subside? I don't know where it subsides.

Anne: I think that's a good question because like I mentioned earlier, when they have a large brood chamber, chances are the bottom box is not actually being used. If they have a lot of supers, they may have filled some parts of some of them, but not all parts of all of them. There definitely aren't bees filling all of those. They might have capped some and they're starting to ignore those then because they need no more care. I think 16 feet is definitely a little bit overkill. That's an interesting question. It's going to be somewhere in the middle undoubtedly because that's the way statistics and life goes is that the middle is always the most numerous. Most of us are average whether we don't want to admit that or not, Jim.

Jim: I wish I could be average. I would love to be average in most times.

Anne: It's quite a burden not being average, isn't it?

Jim: Oh, I can't add that. I'm always below average. I was never chosen first, but I wasn't chosen last either so that worked out well. I wanted to be sure the listeners knew that we're not denigrating people who want big hives. I'm not saying that I'm lazy. I guess I'm getting defensive here. Let me just tell you the truth. What I frequently want from my beehive is to be able to photograph both video and still pictures the various behavioral things the bees are doing and the various attributes that are showing up.

That is really difficult to do that in a boomer beehive because there's just bees festooning hanging everywhere.

You can still get good pictures of that but then I get honey all over my photographic equipment with burr comb breaking and whatever. I'm arguing that there are occasions when I don't want the big hive. I want a hive that's homeostatically balanced, happy with itself and it's healthy, but it's just not this mountainous hive. That's not easy to keep bees that way. They want to get big.

Anne: Yes, they want to get big. There are ways of slowing them down like keeping some more foundation frames ready to give into them because they have-- Instead of using the nectar to just stick it into fully made cells and turn it into honey, they need to process the nectar into wax. It slows down the progress of the hive because there's no cells for a little while. Then as soon as they create those cells for you, you could yank that frame out of there and put it in storage or maybe create a little side cottage industry of selling drawn comb to people.

It's a way of using up their nectar that's coming in without having it turn into honey. If they're getting huge in population, there's other ways to slow them down population-wise, and that's to pull frames of brood out or confine your queen. Don't let her roam all over all the brood frames. You must know about that cage that you could put the queen in. It's shaped like a frame. Maybe even two frames can go into it. That frame isolation cage is a good way to slow your queen down. Maybe she'll even like it because she'll be on half holiday, half normal work schedule for a queen.

Jim: Anne, we got to take a break and hear from our sponsor. When we come back, and I want to give you a heads up, I want to ask you, what do you do with all those nucs and splits that you make when you're pulling out comb and how do you store that? Let's hear from our sponsor for just a minute and then let's go down that path.

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Jim: If I pull out three frames of brood to keep a colony from becoming so large, and I'm really, really careful to be sure that I don't move my queen, what do I do with those three frames of brood? Am I just going to have nucs sitting all around the yard raising their own queen?

Anne: The frames that you're yanking out that they just created comb on foundation for you, you could try and yank them out before they've got any brood in them. If they were at the edge of the brood nest, you may be able to catch them at just that moment when they're drawn, but the queen hasn't gotten to them. Then if it has a little nectar in it, no big deal. I would store them in a very airy place so that they can be safe from wax moths. The bees will probably come and steal that nectar back out of them, and then you've got some fresh white brand new comb.

You don't want to take them out with brood in it unless you're going to put that brood into a nuc or a new split for sure, or you could use it to beef up some other hive that's wimpy, and you'll have much more medium-sized hives everywhere instead of big ones and little ones. You'll have weakened this big one and beefed up the little one and have more mediums like the homeostatic average hive that you are hoping for.

If you actually have so much brood and you want to take it out, and it doesn't horrify you too much, you could just freeze that brood and kill it. You could feed it to the chickens. I would rather not do that. I would rather help out new beekeepers with it, or be in contact with other people in my club and just maybe use some TempQueen to keep the bees from creating queen cells on that brood. Within one or two days, I would be able to distribute it to somebody who needed it, some newbie, somebody who had a package maybe.

Jim: Let me tell you an old story because I want to try to convince the listeners, I haven't lost my mind. I'm not going to try to speak for you.

Anne: Okay. Good luck.

Jim: The reason we're hammering on this is that things happen. 100 years ago, and I say that a lot on this podcast because it was many, many years ago, I got a call from Mississippi that a commercial package producer had more bees than they could shake and they were going to have massive numbers of swarms all across the community if they didn't get this under control. He offered to give me several hundred packages if I would pay for the package cages and for the queens. He would give me the bees.

I bought something like 200 or 300 packages of bees for Ohio State all those years ago, because this guy literally had more bees than he was able to ship, and he was going to lose control of his operation.

Anne: That's amazing.

Jim: I'm asking for sympathy from the listeners that this is not as bizarre as you might think. It's not easy to restrain a colony's growth if there's reasons that you've got for not wanting a big beehive.

Anne: It's a problem for beginners and for commercial people too like that guy, but I often hear from beginners, "It's going so great. I increased from two to six and now they're going great again, and I don't want any more hives. What am I going to do?" They don't want more than five or six hives in their backyard. It's a strange problem of success. We talked about this earlier, and I don't know how to solve the problem of too much success.

Jim: [laughs] That hasn't been a problem for me, too many times, too much success.

Anne: What would you say to the beginners who don't want to make increase?

Jim: I don't know what to say to them. You've got to slow that queen down. That's why you and I have talked about this confinement cage that you put her in, then you correctly said, "Will that elicit swarming if the brood nest is confined to those two frames? Will they try to swarm?" The devil is always in the details because if they try to swarm, at least those unmated queens are trapped in the cage too.

Anne: That's true because only eggs are going to be right where the queen mother is. Maybe that frame isolation cage is going to be some savior to beginners. I also think if beginners just had a nuc off to the side, or maybe a nuc with a nuc super, a two-story nuc that they could not consider it making increase, but just a place to put some brood, and maybe even put their original mother queen into that nuc with the brood, and then-- I'm just rambling again, Jim.

Jim: I want to defend you. There's a lot of tedium here.

Anne: It's like if I suggest people do that, then I'm getting into a big rabbit hole.

Jim: Right. We keep going down into a rabbit hole. Beehives want to be extra large and that's their goal in life. A managed beehive wants to be a big operation. The argument is, our discussion is what if that doesn't fit your management need, and how can you restrict it? You and I are admitting that it's hard to do.

Anne: It is hard to do, but also I think we have to keep in mind that the big population increase period is just the first two months of each year. If people can keep them from swarming-- If they don't care if they swarm, then their solution is just let them swarm. If they can give them some supers, or increase their brood nest area during those first two months, probably the situation is under control, because then the population is going to level off and begin to shrink down on its own.

Giving them extra supers may not mean you're going to get three boxes full of honey. It may just mean that you've given the colony more room, and then they shrink back down to their cubicle size of two deeps, and you take a small amount of honey, and get those empty supers off of there. Again, it's not like every one of those supers is going to be hugely heavy if you want to get down into the brood chamber and take some great brood pictures. They need lots of space to store all that nectar.

Not always every one of the frames in there turned into honey, because the honey takes much less space, and they move it around and consolidate it to the lowest super usually.

Jim: I was thinking as you were talking, beekeepers are not the same. Beekeepers are in different places on their beekeeping journey, and then you said, "Just let them swarm." If you really don't want all those extra bees, and you don't have neighbors that are going to be panicked by these bees hanging on their property for a while, let them swarm. You give away bees back to the ecosystem. You keep the colony size that you want. You get a new queen out of the deal, and that will break up the varroa cycle to some extent, and you can make lemonade out of this mess.

Anne: It's what they want to do anyways. Quite often fighting the swarming instinct is going to fail anyways. The idea of saying, "I'm letting them swarm," is often the same result as, "I tried really hard and oops they swarmed." It's like, "Yes, now there's a swarm in the woods." It's the same result whether you tried very hard, or just decided at the beginning to let them swarm. You got to understand though that those guys in the woods, they're probably going to die within one year.

There's also the fact that your strong hive might go and rob them. They had no varroa control in that tree trunk over there, and they're probably riddled with varroa in the fall. It's not just all roses and candy canes when you are repopulating the woods with wild swarms.

Jim: I agree with that. The irony is a lot of this is going on because keeping these big hives is not a natural thing. It's a beekeeper thing. That same hive would've been much smaller and would've swarmed, swarmed, swarmed. It's our policy to keep these hives abnormally large and to make abnormal honey crops from it. I said last week that we do that in everything.

Anne: That's absolutely right. What they want to go into in the wild is something about the size of a deep, or possibly a little larger, and that would be their whole area for brood and honey. We've got this abnormally tall brood chamber to begin with, and then we put more boxes on it. We're really out of time? I just realized I'm getting other ideas here.

Jim: We need to give the listeners a break, but we can come back to this in future episodes.

Anne: Let's give them a break.

Jim: We'll give them a break. Here's what we've discussed is that there are occasions that some beekeepers would like to keep more smaller manageable hives. We've really got good queen stock now, and it's hard to do. We've got decent control for varroa for the time being. What you and I have been discussing is the surprisingly difficult task of keeping a colony restricted in size without having nuc sitting all around the yard where you're making splits that you've taken out of those big colonies.

If someone just wants five hives, they didn't want five hives and six splits sitting around. It's not really easy, but there are ways to do it. Letting them swarm is one of the ways that comes to mind. It's the perfect and natural thing that bees do unless you've got a high-dollar marked queen in there that you've really bonded with, and you don't want to lose.

Anne: Number 7, you have a lucky, lucky queen that you spent $500 on, but I think that's really rare for the average beekeeper to have that kind of queen. We've got some ideas rolling here. We started out with big ideas and I think we ended up with lots of small ideas like our bee yard with lots of small hives.

Jim: Can you leave this on a positive note, or is that a positive note? That may be as positive as we can get. [chuckles]

Anne: You summed it up very well in the last one or two minutes. I guess I would throw in, if you're keeping a healthy colony and the brood is healthy, there's a lot of different sizes, that can be perfectly fine. You don't have to feel pressure because you don't have hives that are 6.5 feet tall.

Jim: Thank you for talking to us today. I appreciate it very much. I hope that we can continue this topic and others at other times if you're agreeable to it.

Anne: Sure thing, Jim.

Jim: Thank you so much for being here. Listeners, at this point Anne and I are telling you bye. Go forth and keep big hives as best you can.

Anne: Live long and prosper.

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