Plain Talk: Big Hives - Blessing or Curse? (217)

Episode 217 – Plain Talk: Big Hives - Blessing or Curse?

Jim Tew: Hello, Honeybee Obscura podcast listeners. It's Jim here again, so it must be a week later than it was last week. Got something on my mind, as usual. I'm planning for spring, I'm planning for a good season. It's going to be the year. What I was wondering, and it's just a conversation now, this is not a lecture, so if you want to disagree, you want to send me your thoughts and comments, do it. The question for the week is, are big hives always the best hives? I'm going to say that it's complicated and complex, but I'd like to talk to you for a few minutes about it if you can hang on.

Introduction: Welcome to Honeybee Obscura, brought to you by Growing Planet Media, the producers of the Beekeeping Today podcast. Joining 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: How do I start this without sounding like I'm a crazy guy? Beekeeping is fairly standard, but beekeepers are not standard. I've been experiencing this and living this for the last, I would say few years, but it's actually been the last few decades. Young beekeepers, more agile and mobile beekeepers keep bees in ways that older beekeepers and slower and not-so-agile beekeepers keep bees. They're not the same, but they're both beekeepers. It's a little bit like using a broad word automobile to describe cars.

There's a lot of different models and types out there, but automobile covers them all. Beekeeper covers us all. For some of us, those gargantuan hives, three deeps, three supers tall, unheard-of numbers of bees, massive honey production, all of those things are just exactly what you want. Before you think I'm on some kind of drug here, that was exactly what I wanted at a particular stage in my life. I want to discuss the point that these huge hives are not always the way to go in every instance.

Here's a spoiler alert, there's precious little you can do about it. It's really hard to keep a colony at a particular size when it wants to grow, grow, grow. It's hard to keep it that way. Commercial people, for instance, they generally run their equipment in a deep or even two deeps. They're honey producers. Of course, they add supers. I haven't been involved in commercial beekeeping now in about a decade. In general, they don't run these huge hives. Too hard to load, too hard to unload, too hard to stack, too hard to pelletize.

They restrict the basic size of the brood nest. Commercial package producers are just legendary. I don't have time to get off the subject, but some of the package-shaking yards that I've been to, they kept their bees, can you believe it, in a single deep? Two deeps at the most, but frequently a single deep. They had an accomplished beekeeper manager who would go through, find the queen, and then take out a split. Then the shaking crew would come by and shake everything else that remained in that colony into the package funnel into packages.

They would shake everything else out. Then the last crew, the third crew, would come back along and put that split back in the colony and then allow it to grow back up again, staying in a limited number of deeps. I would have thought as a young guy, that package producers would just have these huge colonies and go out and take a few bees off of them. No, they're basically just taking out a split and shaking all the bees out. This whole concept of these huge colonies, that's us. We do it with everything.

I've harped and harped and harped on this very medium that we're always selecting. It's not just bees. We've done it with apples. We've done it with strawberries. We've done it with cantaloupe. That gets me off the subject. I distinctly remember when cantaloupe didn't taste sweet at all. It tasted more like a vegetable. Through the years, cantaloupe have really come a long way toward being what we know as a cantaloupe today.

I wonder if those old varieties are still out there somewhere if some seed saver has those old things. We've modified that. A cornfield is certainly abnormal. A cornfield never occurs in nature. Before I try to make it sound like the beekeepers are unique for selecting these big colonies, big queens, we do it with Holstein. We do it with everything that we come across, roses. We like to make things bigger and better. Bees fit that very well. That would not be the case in the wild.

It would be rare to find a colony as huge in the wild as we try to maintain, if you're the big beekeeper hive guy, and manage bees. In the wild, they would swarm themselves to death. That big colony would make eight or nine smaller colonies, which makes wildly more genetically survival sense. They don't have their eggs in one basket. I'm going to jump way ahead of myself and tell you that, in my humble experience, under the right conditions, a big, beautiful colony can die just as fast as a small, runt colony.

They can go down in a hurry. Basically, part of the reason for it is that these limited colonies, these wild bee colonies, don't have unlimited space. You see, here we are, Billy Joe Beekeeper on the job. When that colony begins to crowd up, we add more space to it. Consequently, it's stuck. You know what happens in a managed beehive when the brood nest becomes crowded? It swarms. Basically, we control Varroa. We do a lot of things that let these colonies get abnormally big because that's what we do as plant breeders and animal breeders.

We manage things for the most production that we can for our human benefit. I'm not prepared to say that that's the wrong thing to do. Truly, large colonies are an artifact, just like that cornfield is an artifact. It's something that beekeepers did. Which colony is going to be a bigger, say, honey producer? That huge colony or that smaller colony? Go figure. That big hive is going to be a much bigger producer of honey. Have more bees available for pollination, have, in theory, more bees available for shaking out.

The bigger colony is going to be more productive. Here's a question for you. Which colony will be more difficult to work? The big one. Which colony is going to be difficult to treat for diseases? We'll go with the big one. Which colony is going to be constantly trying, considering, interested in swarming? That big colony. It's not just going to swarm, it's going to cast big swarms. It's not all cake. Years ago, I asked a USDA researcher, I will say he was at Baton Rouge at the USDA Bee Lab, ARS, why we only had queen stock that produced huge colonies.

Why didn't we have queen stocks that produced colonies at 35,000 to 40,000, could be kept in a deep or maybe a deep and another super? Why don't we just have these big bees? Everything else in the world, we've miniaturized. Plants, cars, electronics, we've miniaturized everything. Bee hives come in one size, extra large. If that hive is not extra large, and it's the right time of the year and the beekeeper is on the job, then that's the goal, to grow to extra large.

I think about 15,000 bees in the winter, it's going to grow to about 60,000 bees in the season of the year, that'd be two deeps and a couple of supers. If you've got three deeps on, you've got one of those really kick-butt queens, I think you can blow up to around 70,000. About 5% of all those bees are going to be drones. Ironically, while I'm talking here in the tens of thousands, and I'm promoting and defending small hives, you get down around 400 bees, you're pretty much at that breakdown point.

Much below 400, their colony cohesion comes apart. That's about a cup of bees, or it's about a baby nuke, hence the reason for a baby nuke. I don't know how you count bees. I don't want to get off the subject. It would be so easy to get off the subject on this. One frame's about 270 square inches on both sides. One good full frame of bees, both sides going to have about 2,400 bees. If you're doing this when the bees are at maximum population, sometime late May, early June, they're really maxed out, and you're doing this estimation that day, you have to assume that about a third of them are out of the colony.

Go with about 2,400 bees on a good full frame, both sides, and go with about a third of them being out. You could say that probably going to be about 64,000 bees in most cases. These big colonies swarm more often. As I said, the disease and pest manager is more of an issue. You got people like me telling people like me that you got to go manage that queen. You go into a colony with 65,000 to 70,000 bees and you find the queen.

I'm saying that there's more labor and that everything seems heavier and everything is sticky and messy when you break all that burr comb. You're going to wear full protective gear. Those of us who want to work those three deeps, three supers, 70,000 bees, I use the word work. You will be working. When I took my grandson back accidentally, not realizing how powerful that particular colony was, and had him help me open that beehive, when it was about the third beehive he had ever been in his life and the first beehives he went into were packages, he was blown away at the number of bees.

They came for us. My grandson was saying to me, "Grandpa, this is out of control. Grandpa, we've lost control." I was thinking, "We are the control. We are the people that someone calls when this many bees are running wild." That particular day, I did the wrong thing opening a big colony with a novice beekeeper, but I felt his concern. Those big colonies are easy to lose control of. Let's take a break while I get over the fact that I abused my grandson on some of his first trips to the bee yard. Let's hear from our sponsor.

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Jim: I want to open with a disclaimer I had when I opened this segment. I am not opposed to big colonies. For the right people in the right places at the right times, big colonies are the manifestation of really competent beekeeping. Having said that, I also say that at times, I don't want a big colony. I wish I could just enjoy bees without the weight and all the bees that are there. If you go out and work a small colony, light protective gear, light smoke, big colony, I've got to go be worried about stings.

I've got to wonder about a four or five-pound swarm hanging on my neighbor's yard, but honestly, a two pound swarm hanging in my neighbor's yard would be about the same thing. It'd be about the same problem. It doesn't really matter to the neighbor there's death-defying bees on their property, as high as it would go. Big swarms, I don't want to lose them. What about all those big bee populations sending bees to the neighbor's pool? Oh man, I can't get off the subject. Don't do it, Jim, don't do it.

My bees going to the neighbor's bird feeders, my bees going to the neighbor's bird water, my bees going to the neighbor's kid's wading pool. Oh, I just cringed to even think about that because I couldn't control them. I had these colonies that were beautiful to photograph and beautiful at honey production that were causing me these correlated issues. How about the fecal spots on the neighbor's car? Neighbor one time said, "These damn birds, I don't know when they're doing this, but look at these little spots all over my car. They must be small birds because the poop spots are so small."

Again, my fifth or sixth opportunity to get off the schedule but I quizzed myself at that moment, when is not telling all the truth a lie? I decided to tell the guy that that indeed was not birds, that indeed it was my bees, but I did hate to do it. These colonies producing big swarms and then they produce-- I just keep harping on this. They produce big secondary swarms. Normally a secondary swarm or a mating swarm is just a tiny swarm, very skittish, erratic, got an unmated queen, hard to handle.

Sometimes those secondary swarms coming from the big colonies are hard to tell that that's being headed by an unmated queen. You try to hive it, it's all over the page. Doesn't stay in the box, flies away, takes off, goes back, causes confusion. Hypothetically, I'll harp on the neighbor again. You're doing all this in the neighbor's yard and their flower bed or around their house, trying to catch this errant swarm.

When that big nice swarm goes, there goes your highly productive marked queen that you paid major money for because it had all the characteristics you wanted. It flies away too. I'm getting really, really, really in a deep hole here as I go on and on and on about the problems with big colonies. Please remember that in the right place at the right time, these big colonies are exactly the way to go. I'm trying to discuss the fact that it's not all roses, that these big colonies are more difficult to handle.

They're more swarmy. One thing that I've never learned how to do, there's just no way to do it. You just have to gut it out. Those of you who've done this for a long time and seen those big beehives when, I don't know, you get down to the two deeps or three deeps or whatever you got them in, and they're just chock-a-block full of bees, you can't keep them from boiling out almost like lava coming out of a volcanic eruption. They just keep boiling out.

Here's the question then. How are you going to put those supers back on? You try to smoke those bees off, smoke, smoke, smoke, smoke, smoke, smoke, you get 90% of them maybe turned around, bees all over the outside of the colony. The bees are everywhere. You turn around to pick up the supers, which may or may not be dead-weight heavy. When you turn back around, what happened? Bees are boiling up.

Do you smoke, smoke, smoke, again or do you say, "Here I am, hot, heavy, stressed, overloaded, smoker going?" All you can do is crush a ridiculous number of bees when you put that big unit back together. I have never figured out a way to really get through that. This is where I was going to say in my thought process that for all that's said and done, these big colonies can disappointingly die just as quickly or almost as quickly, sometimes as routinely as a smaller colony.

I've got all kinds of stories, examples, reasons, justifications, but just because a colony is big and just because a colony has ample honey stores going into winter, that doesn't mean that colony is going to blow out the other side of winter in good shape. I wish it did. Queen can fail in midwinter. The virus infection vector by Varroa may be running rampant. There's just big reasons that those colonies can die. There is this, listeners. I do feel more blue. I do feel sadder. I do feel more unhappy when that big colony dies because it just seems like a bigger waste, a bigger loss.

I expected more routinely the smaller colony to die. I did not expect the big colony to die. It should have been the way to go. I guess I've made my point. What was my point? Make your point clear, Jim. My point is it depends on the beekeeper as to what size colony they want to manage. There's all kinds of commercial industry reasons that I would want a mid-sized colony. There's health reasons that I would want a mid-sized colony.

There's societal reasons that I would want a mid-sized colony, but it's really hard to keep them that way because if I employ just basic routine bee management policies those beehives are going to grow. They're either going to fill more boxes or they're going to swarm. It's just one of the attributes of beekeeping. We just work around it. We work with it. We do whatever we can. If you're having a good day and your bees are having a good day, they're going to grow.

There it is. You decide what you want to do. I didn't have a chance to discuss brood pruning, making splits, and all the things that you would do to suppress population growth, but there's tools out there. That may very well be a segment for some other time. Go out there and work those big beehives, or go out there and work those small beehives. Either way, I hope you enjoy doing it. Until we can talk again about something just as important, this is Jim telling you bye.

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