Author Topic: double queen hive (Read 4273 times)

ibeecanadian · « **on:** February 22, 2005, 01:27:28 pm »

has anyone ever tried a double queen hive? i guess you would have one queen in the bottom brood box, a queen excluder, another brood box with a queen in it, then another queen excluder on top of that. i remember reading about it a few years ago, but i forget the most of it. i would think it would be a lot of work, but it would be a great way to get a very strong hive and split it.[/b][/i]

ibeecanadian · « **Reply #1 on:** February 22, 2005, 01:30:18 pm »

now that i think about it, a hole would have to be made in the second brood box for the drones to get out.... maybe thats not how it went.. i just cant remember??

Michael Bush · « **Reply #2 on:** February 22, 2005, 03:20:06 pm »

Two Queen hives

I will preface this with the fact that Iâ€™ve done this and think it is USUALLY easier to just run two one queen hives. The biggest problem for me is that you have a super hive with supers stacked up to the clouds and bees everywhere and to do anything with the queens requires moving and disturbing every box. All those bees can be very intimidating to a beginner. I think to be practical it requires a system that does not require moving any boxes to get to either queen.

That said, the concept is that two queens will lay twice as many eggs and build up twice as fast in the spring. More workers, more honey.

Here is my design. I would set up a horizontal hive that is three boxes long. (48 Â¾â€) with the entrances on the long side. Make it so you can open or close an entrance on any third of the box on any of the two long sides.

The box needs two grooves into which a piece of a queen excluders fits to divide it into thirds. This allows a queen on each end and supers in the middle.

You can use any of several methods to get the hive to accept two queens, but they are separated enough to not fight and you have two brood nests and one stack of supers in the middle. You can purchase queens, leave the hive queenless for 24 hours and split the brood nest into the two brood boxes with a caged queen in each and try for simultaneous introduction.

If you raise your own queens, you could put a virgin on each end and hope they fly back to the right hive when they are done mating.

You can split the brood into the two brood boxes and divide the hive with a partition, instead of an excluder to make one side queenless and then remove the partition when the queen cells are doing well on the queenless side. It is an art and you need to practice and accept that it may not work the way you think the first few times.

The best time to get two queens laying is early in the spring. The earlier the better. During the honey flow you might be better off to split the hive and put all of the open brood in one of them and most of the bees in the other to up the production in that hive because lots of brood rearing DURING a honey flow does not help production.

Snelgrove had a plan for using one hive to stock the other that was quite ingenious and perhaps some way could be figure out to do that in a more horizontal configuration.

firetool · « **Reply #3 on:** February 23, 2005, 11:53:38 am »

Has any body down south tried two queen hives? The hive and the honey bee from Dadant press said that this would knot work down here. I would like to know why if yall know. It would seem like the more bees their are the more honey they could produce with out regardes to geographic location. :roll:

Any thoughs,

Brian