Plain Talk About Division Board Feeders (169)

Episode 169 – Plain Talk About Division Board Feeders

Jim Tew: Obscura listeners, I bet you that every one of you has either used or knows at least what a division board feeder is. Just to spoil the surprise, if you don't know what it is, it's that feeder that's about the size of a frame that replaces a frame and goes inside the hive. It's a feeder that's inside the hive. What you may or may not know, that thing has a legacy and a history. It didn't start out as a feeder. Hi, I'm Jim Tew. I'm here at  Honey Bee Obscura where, once a week, we talk about something to do with beekeeping. Today, I'm going to do a deep dive into the division board feeder, its history, and its use.

Introduction: Welcome to  Honey Bee 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: I think that division board feeder was probably the second one I ever got, second style. Of course, the first had to be the entrance feeder, the glass jar on the front of the hive that would leak and incite robbing under the right conditions, but it was fun. A good part of beekeeping was to put that feeder on. I felt like I was a beekeeper. When I got that internal hive feeder, I was sophisticated. I was advanced doing all the right things.

Now, as usual, all of my hive feeders, my division board feeders are decades and decades old. I have no earthly idea what new developments have been made. I know that changes have been made. I see them on the tables at meetings, but I don't buy them because I already have them. The new ones have top doors and gates and valves and all that kind of thing. The old ones were just single-piece molded plastic. The old ones, the really old, were smooth.

It was just well-known that bees would drown in great numbers in that feeder because they couldn't climb out. The walls were too slick. Straight away, there was a suggestion that we take a file or a rasp or coarse sandpaper and roughen the inside walls of that feeder. Here's the humorous part. See, there is humor inside the hive. If you let that feeder run dry, then the bees would go scurrying out and bring in propolis and smooth that surface out again.

You've got to keep that roughed up. What happened then was that the company itself began to rough it before they sent it out so the bees could climb back out. Got to have a float in it. My analysis of how that feeder worked and probably still works without a float must be something like the tar pits in California, where animals kept standing on animals and pushing the others down deeper and deeper underneath them.

In those open division board feeders, bees would stand on each other and would slowly drown the bees under them. Then at some point, the one that had done the drowning was then up to the point of being drowned herself. You could pour out a pound of dead bees that had drowned in that feeder. It's got to have a meaningful float in it, wooden stick or multiple sticks or something like that.

It always goes, should go, needs to go on the very outside frame on one side or the other. You can slip it back, pour in your quart, two quarts, gallon of syrup, close it back up, and be gone. It did not really disturb the bees all that much. There's the rub. You got to open the hive to see if the nectar flow has precluded the bees emptying the syrup from the division board feeder. All these things are pretty standard. I like it all right. You could feed about a gallon a day if you could get the syrup to them.

They were noted once you let them run dry because they didn't need feeding anymore and you didn't take the feeder out. They would build a comb in it. At first, that was thought to be a criticism of them. Then it was quickly discovered if the thing was full of comb or had a comb webbing in it that that was a great lattice work for the bees climbing out of the feeder once they were down there trying to pick up the sugar syrup.

There's the whole concept of this thing. I've got a lot of experience with these old feeders. In fact, I built my own. No reason to go into it on a podcast. You'd be crazy for doing it now. Before they were readily available, I made my own. They worked okay. They worked okay. Thing about this is that there's a history to them. That's what I'd like to spend some time talking about is this odd history. That entrance feeder, pretty obvious what that is. Sometimes it's called a bourbon feeder or a pail feeder, this up top, or a top feeder.

Why a division board feeder? To take away the surprise, to take away the expectation of the answer, the reason is because it started its life evolutionarily as something called a division board. A division board still is and is in use and is available today in various forms and styles. A division board is a movable, temporary wall. If you put two in, then you've got two walls. You can restrict the brood nest to wherever you want it restricted to, two, three, five frames, whatever, with these temporary petitions.

Now, before I get any further, to be sure we're all on the same page and because this, after all, is beekeeping and beekeeping has multiple names for everything, sometimes this division board is called a follower board. Sometimes it's called a dummy board. Some of the old authors really didn't like using that name, not because it described the beekeepers, but because it just didn't really fit what was going on here. Anyway, dummy board turns up sometimes. The Root Company had a complicated model of the day called a chaff cushion division board. I'll talk about that in a few minutes, but that was the elite division board of the ilk that was available in the 1920s and thereabout.

This division board then is temporary walls that you move. Why would you want to do that? I have no idea if my next comments are related, but Dr. Tom Rinderer, a lab leader down in Baton Rouge at the Baton Rouge Bee Lab for many, many years, was able to show that bees producing honey, storing honey seemed to store a bit more honey if you would super as the bees needed it, just ahead of their need, rather than putting on three or four supers because the nectar flow is starting there. That's done. Now I can go about my business. My bees are super.

What do you think? Because I'm about to tell you that the old fellows said that by limiting the brood nest area, you took the stress off the amount of work that the bees had to do to maintain the temperature and the humidity in that brood nest. In this petition, let's just say I petitioned off three frames, got a queen in there, and on each side of those three frames, I've got a division board. It's like I've put up an apartment within my deep super.

By having those walls there, then those bees don't have to work as hard to maintain the brood temperature in the brood nest. They don't have to work as hard collecting water to maintain the humidity or to control the humidity in any other way. The old fellows said that freed up the bees to go forage. Then by flying out and foraging that that brought back the vim and the vigor and the enthusiasm that you see in a beehive in the spring when everybody is happy and everybody is bringing in nectar and good times are all around.

The primary reason that they liked it was because it made the hive more efficient. Now, they said it, not me. They said it, but they said that, ideally, that using these division boards was more effective than feeding to stimulate brood production inside that nest because the bees could bring in more and bring it in naturally and excite the hive, get a lot of energy going. That was better than me trying to put in something, a division board feeder, an entrance feeder, or whatever, and boost them with my own sugar syrup concoction.

Where I'm going with this now is back to Dr. Rinderer's comments. When you put on three and four empty supers at one time, am I changing the temperature dynamics, the humidity dynamics inside the colony so that the bees are having to work harder to maintain that cavity? Because you and I have talked in the past about how our beehive is set up in the cold-way-entrance-type system.

Having the entrance on the narrow end of the hive box lets air blow right in the entrance and, in theory, blow right up through the frames. The old books call the way that we set up our hives the cold-way entrance. If you put the entrance on the long side, that was called the warm-way entrance because then the air comes in and this frame bottom bar serve as baffles to break up that airflow.

Since we have this cold-way hive entrance and air is blowing up in theory through the brood nest up into that cavern that I've set up now with two or three or four empty supers up there, is that affecting things? These fellows were not talking about that. I keep saying "fellows." I'm not neglecting the women, but the authors that I'm referring to were all men from the 1800s and early 1900s. I'm wondering if that attribute of our hive is what allowed Dr. Rinderer to say that in a lecture he gave all those years ago.

Nonetheless, that may or may not be the reason that bees work toward filling the supers quicker if you give them to them just as they need them rather than putting on two or three at the time. The confusion grows when you read different authors describing the different needs that they had for these division boards. While I change my gears mentally, let's take a short break and hear from Betterbee, who, I might add, does have some division boards in their inventory.

Betterbee: Winter's chill won't last forever. It's time to think of spring. On warm days, take a break from hibernation and check to see if your bees are out and about, knock on wood or, better yet, a hive. No buzz? Can't hear the hum? Uh-oh, time to think ahead. You might need to replenish your colony. Fear not. Head to betterbee.com/bees and secure your package or new colony now. Don't be left out in the cold. Plan ahead. Because at Betterbee, we're making sure your spring bees are all abuzz.

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Jim: Some of the old authors, some of the old beekeepers actually wanted this to be a bee-tight partition. Now, that's totally different from what I'm talking about. The first author I described said, "Don't let this thing go all the way to the bottom board. Leave a 3/8 inch slot along the bottom and there's also space along the ends. It's not to make it like cozy, cozy tight. It's just to restrict the brood frames into the areas that I've roped off figuratively with these two division boards. Then as they need the space, I will move those over."

Now, it was quickly pointed out that any empty space outside of the division boards needs to be filled with frames. Because if something goes wrong, if you miss a day or two or whatever and you forget that those things are in there, the bees will move outside of that confined area because you didn't imprison them there. You just, more or less, restricted them there. They will move out of that confined area and you know the mess they'll make in that open place, in that open spot where you had not put frames in.

Even though you're using these division boards, you ought to have frames everywhere else. It was also pointed out even in the late 1800s that this was a good way to produce new combs and to replace the combs that had gotten old and dark. Even in the 1890s or 1910s, '20s, there were suggestions on how to replace and remove the comb. Don't close it off to the very bottom. Cut it short so that there's an entrance pretty much all the way around it. It just generally restricts and helps the bees maintain it. There's a sense of closeness. Maybe bees like that. They certainly love close lives, don't they?

Now, after I've given you all that, here's this. There were other authors who made these things remarkably bee-tight. Their goal was to use them to make divides or to raise queens. I've never done that. I am a woodworker and I am pessimistic that that simple wooden box with that frame hanging there is going to stay bee-tight. That's just going to be a demand on that box that no bee can squeeze through.

Because if a bee can squeeze through, then another bee can squeeze through, and then yet another. Then before you know it, they're moving back and forth between these two nucs that you've got separated by what you thought was a bee-tight follower board. If anybody's done it, I'm probably going to get blasted for saying this, but I'm just pessimistic. I don't know why you wouldn't just use some of those duplex model queen boxes or nucs and be assured that those bees can't squeeze back and forth, but there was certainly a possibility to do that.

Now, racing right along with this concept, all those years ago, the Root Company manufactured and then promoted in their old 1880 ABC of beekeeping how to make your own chaff cushion division board. Just using simple slats, inch and a quarter wide, make a frame that'll fit in the place of a frame. You understand what I'm drawing in your mind? It's just a simple, one, two, three, four, four pieces, inch and a quarter wide tacked together. That's the same size as a frame. Then cover that in ducking or duck cloth, which was a heavy canvas.

Then you've made this bag thing with a wooden frame and you pull the ducking taunt so that it stayed in place and then you tacked it, and then you fill that with insulation. One of the uses for these follower boards was for winter use in cold weather. There would be a follower board on each side of the colony, on either side of the cluster at least. It doesn't have to be on the outside wall. That's where it usually was. Then those bees would be able to winter better in theory.

AI Root, all those years ago, gave explicit instructions on how to build this. Now, I've got you to the point where I want you. If you use this old 1.25-inch wide frame and you put this ducking all around it, it's not a long stretch to see that you've actually almost built a container. Some beekeeper, I don't know who, I'm sure he gets credit or she gets credit somewhere in history, put wooden walls on that and sealed it up tight and they used it as a feeder.

I wonder if that clever beekeeper was not double dipping, using it as a feeder, and also using it as an insulation device for cold weather. I don't know what it is, modern-day beekeepers. I don't know what it is, why we have given up on so many concerns that our forefathers and mothers had about their bees 50, 60, 100 years ago. All the hive packing and the work we did to get our bees through the winter and none of that now. Just let that beehive sit out there.

They really put a lot more effort into it and they put a lot more effort into getting their bees through the winter. I don't know what happened. I don't know why we changed in that regard. These chaff-type division board feeders, I offer a guess, could be used in the winter as an insulation device and could be used then in the rest of the year, in the summer, spring months, fall months as a supplemental feeder.

When you do that now, when you get those feeders in there, you probably want to do something to keep the mice out of there because I've had mice build nest in empty feeders and be quite happy doing it. It seems that these devices have significant use. What I'd like to have done here is just introduce you to this old piece of standard equipment, a division board feeder, and tell you that it was a division board before it became a division board feeder and that it had multiple uses, primarily in surviving the winter and keeping the brood nest area centralized as the colony grew.

Don't put those three frames in there, four frames, and then not go back and add that space when you need it because you know you're going to start swarming or you're going to split the brood nest and you're basically going to make a mess. Either use them or don't use them, but don't put them in and forget them. I put these pieces of equipment in the same category as a slatted rack.

It's probably a useful piece of equipment that does the job it's supposed to do, but you just don't have to have it. You decide if you want it or not. Hey, I deeply appreciate you listening. If you've got any comments or experiences about this topic or about any topics we've ever talked about, let us know. Help us grow. Help all of us grow. Until next Thursday, this is Jim telling you bye.

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