Alan Wade, Dannielle Harden: Managing Two-Queen Hives (340)

340 - Alan Wade, Dannielle Harden: Managing Two-Queen Hives

Amanda: Hi, I'm Amanda Staley. I'm from Illinois. We're here at the North American Honey Bee Expo, having a great time. Welcome to Beekeeping Today Podcast.

[music]

Jeff: Welcome to Beekeeping Today Podcast, presented by Betterbee, your source for beekeeping news, information, and entertainment. I'm Jeff Ott.

Becky: I'm Becky Masterman.

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Jeff: Hey. A quick shout-out to Betterbee and all of our sponsors, whose support allows us to bring you this podcast each week without resorting to a fee-based subscription. We don't want that, and we know you don't either.

Be sure to check out all of our content on the website. There, you can read up on all of our guests, read our blog on the various aspects and observations about beekeeping, search for, download, and listen to over 300 past episodes, read episodes' transcripts, leave comments and feedback on each episode, and check on podcast specials from our sponsors. You can find it all at www.beekeepingtoday.com. Thank you, Amanda Staley from Illinois, for that wonderful opening from the North American Honey Bee Expo.

Becky: Just the heart of the Midwest. That is fantastic. They've got some great beekeepers in Illinois.

Jeff: Yes. You've met quite a few, haven't you? You've spoken there?

Becky: I haven't been there, actually, for a while to speak, but I drive through it a fair amount to get to other states.

[laughter]

Jeff: It's a pass-through state. [laughs]

Becky: No. Being from Minneapolis-Saint Paul, driving to Chicago is just a thing that you do a lot growing up, and so fond memories of talking to some of their beekeepers. You just know when clubs are just really organized and great at getting information out. I've met great beekeepers from Illinois.

Jeff: It's been a busy, busy, busy spring. Bees are hanging out of trees right now. Actually, in my case, they're just going from one hive to another, but that's a different case. How are your bees doing?

Becky: It's always a game of ketchup, and you always feel like you're behind. As soon as you feel like, "Great, I got that done," then you realize there's another task on the horizon. I've done some really big things. I moved most of my bees down to a single deep and used VarroxSan to control mites to get better control in the summer. Just catching up with getting new equipment onto colonies for supers. I use a lot of deep boxes so that I can draw comb out for the next year. I feel like I'm okay, but at the same time, there are things to do on my to-do list when it comes to the bees. [laughs]

Jeff: For sure. Hopefully, the VarroxSan helps keep the mite level down to a reasonable roar. I'm looking forward to see the results this year. Now, so many beekeepers are starting to use it this year. It came on so late last year.

Becky: A lot of beekeepers do it, but I was like, "You know what? If I can keep all of the brood nest in one box, whatever treatment I use, it doesn't have to span two boxes." There was a great beekeeper in Minnesota last year when I did the US honeybee survey, and he's like, "Right above the excluder, that first box of honey that they get, that's theirs. They get to keep that for the winter." I'm doing that, planning for winter, at the same time making honey and hopefully keeping the mites confined and managed. Fingers crossed, right? [chuckles]

Jeff: You're planning for winter right now, just like the bees are doing.

Becky: Yes, exactly. Exactly.

Jeff: You've got the bee mindset.

Becky: It's always good to have a plan. The weather, the flowers, bee health, it all changes it, but starting with a plan.

Jeff: Hey, how many queens do you keep in each colony?

Becky: I've got eight in one right now, but that's my queen bank. [laughs[

Jeff: Whoa. Oh, okay. All right, I fell for that one.

Becky: Sorry. I'm sorry. Generally, it's a one-queen system, Jeff, but how about you? Do you have any two-queen systems?

Jeff: No. I just use the traditional one-queen system. In the past, Kim and I talked to Tom Theobald about two-queen systems. Unfortunately, Tom is no longer with us, but we have an author, an Australian beekeeper, who's written a book about two-queen honey production. He's going to be our guest today. I'm really looking forward to talking to Alan Wade.

Becky: I'm looking forward to it too. I love this two-queen system. One, it's heightened management skills, and two, heightened production, and possibly, three, more varroa, which hopefully we have the tools to combat number three. [laughs]

Jeff: We'll have to ask Alan about that. I know Alan is out in the green room, so let's hear from our sponsors, and we'll be right back with Alan Wade about two-queen systems.

[music]

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Jeff: Hey, everybody. Welcome back. Sitting across this great big transpacific Beekeeping Today Podcasttable, we have Alan Wade and Dannielle Harden all the way from Down Under, Australia. Welcome to the show.

Alan: Thank you.

Becky: It's so nice to have you. Thank you for staying up late so that you could join us in this recording.

Dannielle: We're talking to you from the future.

[laughter]

Jeff: How is it? Is it any better?

[laughter]

Dannielle: It is.

Jeff: Are my bees going to swarm tomorrow? [laughter] Welcome to Beekeeping Today Podcast. It's really fun to say we've had quite a few Australian beekeepers on the show, and that's exciting. I really like that. I'm looking forward to doing an actual show from Australia one of these days. I think we need to find an Australia sponsor, Becky, and have them bring us to Australia.

We invited you here today to talk to us about the two-queen honey production system. We mentioned in a introduction several years ago, Kim and I had Tom Theobald. He was in Boulder, Colorado, talking about two-queen systems. We'll put that link in the show notes.

Alan, you just released a book on two-queen honey production from Northern Bee Books, one of our sponsors.

Alan: Yes. The Great Crowd. Yes.

Jeff: Before we get into two-queen production, we'll start with ladies first. Dannielle, tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got started in bees.

Dannielle: If it's not obvious, I don't have an Aussie accent. I'm actually from the US. In fact, from the Beehive State. It's where I originated. Actually, today is the 10-year anniversary of coming to Australia. On this day, 10 years ago, is the first time I set foot on Aussie soil.

Jeff: I have to ask, was it bees that lured you to Australia?

Dannielle: No. We were coming here with my husband's job, and he got a placement here. It was supposed to be temporary. [chuckles] Then three years turned into five years, turned into 10 years. It's been a great journey coming here, sight unseen. Even the immigration person, when they stamped our passports coming in, he said, "Oh, where are you staying?" and we said, "Canberra." He said, "Oh, I'm so sorry."

Becky: Oh no.

[laughter]

Dannielle: We had no idea. We'd never been to Australia at all, and we were like, "Oh no, what have we done?" [laughs] It was a difficult move, moving from one country to another, but it's been a wonderful life-changing, seize the moment of adventure. That's also part of what brings me into beekeeping, is that it was a seize the moment of adventure.

Jeff: Were you keeping bees in the States?

Dannielle: No. It was one of those things that always caught my interest. I had a lot of wrong assumptions about beekeeping. For some reason, I thought bees were kept in hives that were like filing cabinets. You just pulled out the drawer and pulled out the files [chuckles] with the bees. I also thought that bees built their comb according to magnetic fields, and that's how they were all lined up straight. Lots of wrong assumptions when I first started, but you learn pretty quickly.

Alan: She does learn very quickly. She's one of those people who's just a natural beekeeper. When I say a natural beekeeper, she understands bees and just gets straight into it, yes.

Jeff: Alan, tell us about your background with bees. How did you get started?

Alan: I was always interested in the insect-plant interface during postgraduate studies. Then after I'd done my postgraduate work and whatever, one time my wife said, "You've always been interested in bees. There's a beekeeping course in Canberra." That was 45 years ago. She's now a bee widow. [laughter] That's always the case, I think. You become very attached to your bees, but you realize as you get older that there are other things in life as well. The bees shouldn't just take over your life. I try and get a balance. We go to lots of theater and lots of music, and camp when we can and holiday at the coast when we can.

I've got a friend who keeps native bees, the Tetragonula carbonaria, on the coast. I've been down with him recently, and we've been splitting those hives. It's interesting how much carries over from one to the other.

Jeff: What kind of bees did you say those were?

Alan: Tetragonula, the stingless bees. These are social rather than solitary. I've learnt that the biology of those is probably more complex and more varied than in honeybees. It's always a journey. Going over to two queens was like starting beekeeping again too. You really had to learn everything again to make it work.

Jeff: Were you focused on honey production at that point?

Alan: Yes, just honey production, but I was more interested in the insects than the honey production, and I think it's always been the case. Come to harvest time, and you've got to get out and extract all this stuff. You'd really like to just keep the bees, but it is nice to have the honey as well. Very early on, I read Robert Banker's – you probably know it – The Hive and the Honeybee. He ran 1,500 hives with as many packages and nucs as a game, and made a great success of it. Then later, I learned about beekeepers in Canada and the States that are also-- People like Tom Theobald and Ron Miksha, who you know. He got out of beekeeping, and he knew Don Peer very well.

In another book I produced, Highways and Byways of Beekeeping, I wrote small tributes to those beekeepers: to Tom, to Ron Miksha, and a few others. Egbert Alexander from around about 1907, I think. You probably know of these beekeepers. They were wonderfully inventive people. Then, of course, we came into the modern era with Clayton Farrar, Floyd Moeller, and John Hogg, and a few others that really revolutionized two-queen beekeeping.

Jeff: What is two-queen beekeeping?

Alan: There are two types. There are those that Ron Hesbach [ed. William Hesbach] and a few others have written about in the American beekeeping journal, where you have got separate colonies – could be two, could be three. In cases I've come across, up to about six single hives in a row. You put queen excluder on top, and you put sheets of newspaper on, and you put a coffin hive on top. You've got what we call doubled hives or multipled hives. They're essentially single colonies sharing the same honey super or honey supers, and they mingle and work quite happily together.

They're quite distinct from what I'd call two-queen hives, where you have all the bees and all the queens in the one hive. In fact, Alexander, around 1907, learnt how to introduce queens to queenright hives, and he had up to 15 queens operating in a hive. Everybody thought this was impossible, including the editors of your previous magazine-- what's it, Bee Culture? They were quite astounded that you could actually introduce queens into queenright hives and run them. There are some things about two-queen hives which we should discuss, but basically, that's it.

What happened later was that after Farrer and all the wonderful people who really understood bees got going, Floyd Moeller and John Hogg worked out that you could run your queens together. You could run giant brood nests. If you had one colony above the other, all it needed was a queen excluder in between them. You got this large oval brood nest with queens working either side. They couldn't get at each other, and they didn't get to each other. You could run them in a horizontal fashion with a vertical queen excluder, which is basically what the original inventor of the doubled hive invented, where you've got the bees working side by side, and again, you have a zipper on top.

There, the nests actually work together. You actually get giant brood nests. We're wondering what's going to happen with varroa. Are they going to be varroa heaven? If you know what I mean.

Jeff: I was going to save that question for later, after we got through basic discussion of what the two-queen system is. Tom Theobald, and that's my only exposure to understanding or knowledge of the two-queen system, he ran his in a vertical, two queens, one above the other, separated by a queen excluder, and then honey supers basically on top of that.

Alan: I think he ran the Farrah system and the original system, where they had one queen at the bottom, and then an excluder, and then a series of honey supers in between. Then the other queen on top, and on top of that, more supers. That was exceptionally difficult to work, but what Floyd Moeller and John Hogg discovered was that you could actually run the brood nest together. That meant that you could run all the brood at the bottom and just put your honey supers on top. You operate them just like a single-queen hive.

Becky: You still have two-queen excluders, but one above the first brood box, one above the second brood box. Correct?

Alan: That's right. Although you didn't really need an excluder above the second one, but you would for the practicality of brood getting up there.

Becky: For that, the original combining of those two hives is going to be done with newspaper, correct, as you mentioned earlier?

Alan: Yes. I learned a lot about beekeeping from John Hogg. It's really worth going back and looking at his papers. He worked out about half a dozen ways of establishing two-queen hives. You can condition hives so that you could actually start the colony with two queens. Normally, you can't. What John Hogg discovered was that if you dequeen a hive, you can introduce any number of queens to a hive.

Becky: Mated queens, right? Because if you do cells, you might just end up with one.

Alan: Yes. You can't really get a two-queen system from unmated queens, no.

Dannielle: It's possible, but they have to go into two separate entrances. When they go out for their flights, they might get mixed up and cross around.

Alan: Yes, all those things. They discovered that if you're using eight-frame gear, which I've used all my life, you could use a double brood box at the bottom. There tended to be less brood in the upper brood box for some reason. I'm not quite sure why. Then you put it with those three boxes then you put your supers on top. You end up with these very unstable things that tip over in the paddock. You get down to the paddock, and you've got this mess. Hopefully, the queens haven't mixed themselves up. That's one of the problems with two-queen systems. You've got to know where your queens are. You must know. Otherwise, you lose them.

The other thing about two-queen hives is that as the season goes on, if you get a dry spell, you'll lose one of those queens. At the end of the season, you'll lose one of those queens, unless you actually split them. They're only a temporary thing, and they really only run well when you've got good conditions.

Jeff: I want to make sure we're clear that two-queen systems are a year-round proposition. You start out with single colonies, and then at some point during, I imagine, the spring and during the buildup, you combine them. Then you have your honey production run, and then you split them again.

Alan: That's right, or you pull the excluder and let the better queen take over the old one. This is how people raise queens these days. They pull a few frames of brood out, they put a nuc board in, division board, whatever you call it – not sure what you call it in the States – or you put a double screen in and you put a queen in the top. You establish a nucleus on top of the hive, and then what people normally do is then use that queen on the top to requeen the lower section.

Some very smart systems have been developed by this HiveIQ crowd, where they raise the queen on top, they took the bottom box away with a double screen in, they could move the top box straight down to the bottom, they've requeened. They haven't looked for queens, and they put the single box on the bottom on the truck and drove to the next apiary. During the day, most of the bees drifted back to the parent hive, and at the next apiary, they could open up and find the queens very easily. They could requeen 100 colonies in a day quite easily, so really quite smart techniques.

Becky: I'm curious. Dannielle, you've been keeping bees for at least 35 years less than Alan. Are you running all two-queen systems, or are you doing this with some bees in your apiary? How do you use this system?

Dannielle: Almost all of my hives are two-queen systems of one type or the other. I like to experiment with different configurations. I've got the two-queen system where it's a brood box, queen excluder, brood box, queen excluder, and then supers. Then I've got systems where there are two boxes of brood side by side, and then there's a queen excluder that's balanced in between the middle. Then these honey supers go up like that, so it's shaped like an upside-down T, with a chimney of supers going up the middle.

Becky: On either side of that queen excluder, do you have nuc box covers covering the other--

Alan: Yes. You just have a little bit of board, yes.

Becky: Okay. I'm going to make sure people get that visual so that you don't have an open colony, but you use nuc box migratory covers basically.

Dannielle: Yes. I actually imported some migratory covers for those ends that work quite well, but just a flat board, as long as it doesn't slide off, sitting on top of that roof is enough. When you're running it in the summer, having the insulation on the roof is not as critical.

Alan: One of the craziest guys I've come across was a guy called Stringy Hughston. He ran 1,200 colonies, tripled hives. Not three-queen hives, tripled hives. He put two sets of three hives in a row on a pallet so that there were two colonies with three each, and then he put long coffin supers on top of those. They actually covered those three boxes. Then he had one at the back and covered the others so that everything was mechanized.

Then he could put on extra coffin supers, or on top, he used 10-frame covers all the way across. If a part of that colony was doing really well, he could then stack a single 10-frame super on top of all that. He had these, and he was carting out honey by the tanker load. The area up there in the Channel Country, basically desert, but on the floodplain of the Paroo River, there's virtually a year-round honey flow. He had another apiary where he didn't raise queens, he brought queens in, but he ran a nucleus arrangement there. If any of those colonies failed, you could tell by lifting the lid on the honey supers, and if there wasn't honey in one super, you knew the queen below had failed.

He'd pull that box out, shove a new nucleus in, put a sheet of newspaper on, put the excluder over the whole lot, put the coffin supers back on again. He had this honey factory, and he employed everybody in the town. The amount of honey they got was just unbelievable. The first time I ever tried two-queen hives, I got a ton of honey off eight hives, and it was just a good year. I didn't know anything about two-queen hives at that stage. I just stacked one colony on top of the other, so I had two double boxes, and then I had supers on top of that.

I found I had to star-pick at them. What do you call those things? Do you call them star pickers too? The poles you'd belt into the ground? The triangular poles that you use for fencing.

Becky: Do you see our questioning looks, Alan? We don't know what you're talking about.

[laughter]

Alan: Just basically a steel pole that's going into the ground.

Jeff: Oh, T-post.

Alan: I found I had to strap them to stop the cattle knocking the colonies over because they were eight high. That year, I spent all my time moving brood out of the brood boxes into the supers, any steel brood. Gave them queens unlimited room to lay, and they were bees on steroids. You get rivers of honey in those conditions, but things go wrong as Dannielle and I can both tell you. Perhaps you could tell a story too about that, Dannielle.

Dannielle: I want to put a pin in that because I still haven't finished describing all of my hives as well. You've got now--

Becky: We've got the first two, right?

Dannielle: Yes, the first two, and then we got the upside-down T, and then we've also got what Alan was describing with Sticky-- I'm trying to remember. The coffin hives.

Becky: You do that too?

Dannielle: I do not. I am a hobby beekeeper doing this out of my backyard. There does come this upper limit. I also have a full-time job and a family and kids. I have to say I've got a limit on the number of hives just because I need to take care of them. Anyways, the other type of hive that I have uses a resource hive. I'm pretty sure I got that one from Betterbee because it's the 10-frame box that's been divided. Then on top of that, it's got two deeps, and it all is the same dimension as the 10-frame box.

Then on top of that, when both hives are okay, they're both two-queen, right? Then I put the queen excluder on top of that, make sure that the queen excluder is well sealed against that top, so the bees just don't crawl directly from it. They have to go through the excluder and then down to the other side. Then I'll put a 10-frame super on top of that. That's a different way to manage it.

Becky: Are you having to do a lot more swarm management in that setup?

Alan: One of the things about two-queen hives is you've got two lots of queen pheromone. Even though you've got 110,000 bees in your colony, they don't swarm. Except one year when we had everything flowered, absolutely everything from late winter through to late autumn, and we just couldn't get the honey off fast enough. That year, both of us had colonies with two queens, and they both swarmed with both queens at the same time. When it was, I think, actually united and the queens got at each other, and you end up with one queen, I ended up with two separate swarms, which I put back in the boxes, and when I went again, it was two-queen hives.

Dannielle: It was an intense year for swarms. I was getting swarms of bees in my yard which were not mine, because I mark all my queens. That's part of that keeping track of your queens. By marking them, it makes it so much easier for me to find them. I'd say at least 90% of the time when I'm looking through the brood box, I'll find her. Just from marking her, and also just queen spotting skills, and look on the frame that you think she's on first.

Alan: The gentleman who couldn't join us tonight, Frank Darwin, is a good beekeeper, but he's more the engineer, more the carpenter. He's built himself, and I sent you a picture today of that, a four-queen colony, a horizontal four-queen colony with vertical queen excluders. On top of that, he puts what we call ideal frames, but he put on a coffin super on top of that. The year before last, I got no honey. He got half a ton of honey off this four-queen hive.

That's the attraction of two-queen hives or multiple-queen hives. That you get a lot more honey, a lot more per bee, which Farrah demonstrated very clearly.

Becky: I want to go back to Dannielle's apiary. Dannielle, I've got three types of two-queen hives. Do you have any more types?

Dannielle: I have one more. The HiveIQ was made here in Canberra, so I had to get one and figure out if there was some way to turn it into a two-queen hive. They don't make the commercial bottom board like there was for the Paradise hives, so you couldn't just put an entrance. I had to make experiments and put a hole in a box to make that extra entrance, but I also use these entrance covers by-- It's a UK invention. I think it's the downside-up or upside-down hive entrance. I'll have to find that. It's wonderful because it helps cover to prevent drafts, and it reduces robbing because it does limit that entrance quite a bit.

It gives that hole which is so required to let the drones out, because if the drones are trapped because there's this queen excluder that prevents them to go all the way down, and there's no upper entrance to let them out, the bees will start chewing the box to make the entrance where you might not want it to be.

Alan: You need to build a rim with an entrance in it, do you? Is that what you did? A 12 max millimeter rim?

Dannielle: I did use the 12-millimeter rim for a little while, but I didn't like it because then they build more bar comb on the queen excluder or on the bottom of the frames. That's when I started looking in different ways of putting the hole in the box without losing that integrity because you can also plug that hole again later on if you need to, and that cover on it helps the drafts and things like that. That seems to be working quite well.

Jeff: We need to take a quick break here and hear from our sponsors. We'll be right back to learn more about the two-queen systems with Alan Wade and Dannielle Harden. We'll be right back.

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[music]

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Becky: Welcome back, everybody. Buckle up, everybody, because we are in it. I think this is going to be one of those episodes where people have to listen twice because there's a lot of information in here and a lot of visualization about these colonies. I just want to take a little tiny step back because the two-queen system, it seems like, from what you're telling me, it could be easier on queens because they're sharing in the production, so one plus one might not equal two, but might equal 1.5 brood production, or we don't know the number, 1.7. It could be easier on your queens.

It definitely increases brood production and population so that they're able to take advantage of the nectar flow, but then you surprised me with the swarm management as another potential benefit because of the queen pheromone. I think, Dannielle, you could tell us a little bit more about possibly how that's going to work in the colonies.

Dannielle: I'm not a scientist, so I'm going to have a layman's summary of how I understand this. Basically, bees, when they're inside the hive, they're in the dark. They don't actually know how big the hive is. They only know that they're bumping into all their sisters, and their sisters are sharing information by chemical signaling, and the queen substance gets distributed. The concentration of the queen substance, in some ways, gives them a census. If it's a really weak queen substance, it's probably a really big colony.

If there's two queens, then there's double the amount of that production, so the concentration's higher. There's this fouling of the census, so that they think there's actually fewer bees in the colony than there actually are.

Becky: With two queens.

Dannielle: There's a lot of other swarming pressures, like the nectar coming in and temperatures, and things like that. As far as the two-queen system goes, that concentration of queen substance per number of worker bee is a lot higher. They think the colony is smaller, so it's not quite the time for them to swarm.

Becky: As long as you're keeping up a supering, so that nectar doesn't get stored in the brood nest, that's going to be really the key?

Alan: One of the things I always said, if you let your supers fill up with honey, you might as well have two single-queen hives. You're not going to get any benefit from them at all . In fact, when you put on one super with a single-queen hive, you put on two or three with a two-queen hive. Of course, when you're building your bees in spring, if you've got two queens there, they'll eat twice as much honey and twice as much pollen to build. In one year, I had very early flow on red box.

We then had a dearth for the rest of the year. The bees just went crazy. They filled up extra boxes of honey, and then as soon as they'd finished, I didn't take one of the queens out, which I should've done, and they ate all the honey. Understanding the dynamic of two-queen hives is very, very complex. You've got to get the timing right. You can't divide the colony too early or you'll only have weak colonies building with two single queens. You've got to have enough bees. You've got to have strong bees to make a two-queen colony.

Dannielle: You have to know your nectar flow so that you're ready, and you're checking supers.

Alan: You need to know your strength of your colonies. If you look at Farrah's graphs, which are in the book, you'll see how he timed the introduction of the second queen, and he still had time before the main flow, but we get very early flows. What I do, and I do with single-queen hives as well, is I divide my colonies in autumn, when they're strong enough, and put an extra queen in. I put them alongside one another. Then in spring, perhaps on the first day of spring or even the last days of winter, I then pile them up as two-queen hive.

Immediately, I've got a very strong colony. That will pick up a flow in our October, which is, what, your March in the States. Just coming into the end of spring, you're coming into the first flows, and you can get honey off a two-queen hive. In fact, in the UK, Ellis and Medicus worked on bees so that they only got really strong colonies at the end of the season. They got the honey flow during the year, that overflow, and they then migrated their bees to the ling heather.

They left one queen at home with a few bees and took all the sealed brood and all the bees and the other queen, and then took it out to the heather. You don't need an extra queen during a honey flow, you need bees. That's the point. You build your bees for the flow, not on the flow. That's one of the cardinal rules of two-queen beekeeping.

Jeff: It sounds like this is not a first-year beekeeper pursuit?

Alan: No, it's like herding cats. It's quite difficult. That's why I said I started again in beekeeping when I started two-queen hives. Dannielle picked it up straight away, but she's different [chuckles]

Dannielle: I had a conundrum because, remember my coming here was supposed to be temporary, so we were renting. Part of the provision of me having bees is that I could only have one hive. [laughter] I got through my first year. It was okay. Didn't get anything, but I did build up to have two brood boxes, the top one being full of honey ready for winter. Got through winter, they survived, yay. Now I've got to figure out how to use swarm management without splitting.

This was when I started looking around, "How am I going to do this?" I found out about Demaree. I split the bees that way. It's still technically all under the same roof, so at least to the landlord, it still looks like one colony. [laughter] Then what do I do after? Now, I have two queens. They're both perfectly good. Let's try a two-queen hive, and that's what I did on my second year, and it worked really well. It was an okay year, but apparently I was doing better than other people in my area. I'm like, "Well, that wasn't too hard." Now, I've got two queens and just keep this up. That's what I did.

Becky: I got to bring it back. I just want to make sure people are following us with the Demaree mention. We've talked about it before on the podcast, but not at length. The Demaree is originally for swarm control, where you're going to do brood box, queen excluder, super, super brood box, and keep the queen down below. There are other details. We can link to an explanation, but then in the top box, usually you control for the queen production and call any queen cells. You just let them go and mate?

Dannielle: What I did is I did a double-screen board. For that, I guess, Snelgrove would be the other name to throw in there for that method. I had brood box, super, double screen board, and then brood box on top. I was even following the Snelgrove method with changing the gates on the sides of the boxes to try to reduce the pressure of the number of workers and things like that. I still got a pretty good queen out of that.

Alan: You've got to provide an entrance for the top queen to mate. This is what happens with Demaree. It's one of the ways that people establish two-queen hives, is to Demaree. Then they get an extra queen in the top. Some people use that queen to requeen their hives and just go back to single-queen hives.

Becky: The true Demaree is to call the queen cells and then recombine them so that they don't swarm, but you have that population. You do what most beekeepers like to do with Demaree is, "Oh my gosh, we could put another queen up there."

Dannielle: Yes.

Becky: I just wanted to make sure that was clear.

Dannielle: I guess what I was doing was more correct, saying it was the Snelgrove method because you've got a double screen board and you've got technically six entrances, two in the front, and then two on each side. You flip them around so the bees are all confused on which entrances to go in, and they get tricked to go into the lower hive instead of the upper hive. You don't have to do that. All those switches. [laughter]

Becky: Save people time.

Dannielle: Yes. It was my second year of beekeeping. I was following instructions, but it worked very well, and I use double-screen boards quite extensively still throughout all of this. If I find a queen that's failed, then I just do a double-screen split in order to raise my own queen, and then just reestablish once both hives are queen, right? Also, because they've been sitting right next to each other and sharing a lot of smells between each other, I found that the combine is really smooth. Very little fighting. If there's a really strong flow on, I don't even need the paper.

Alan: One of the interesting things about beekeeping is that all of us lift hives to control swarming. That's really running two queens. What people do is smack them back together again when the honey flow starts. That's a two-queen system if you think about it, or if you establish a nuc next to your main colony and you get that going, you're providing extra brood and extra bees at the same time as requeening. They're all variants of two-queen systems except that you're actually running them as separate hives.

Becky: Horizontal versus vertical.

Jeff: We could go on all day, all night for you on two-queen systems. This is really fascinating, and actually really an exciting idea that I think if you're experienced in beekeeping, Dannielle's experience, don't use it as necessarily the template, but take some experience and some mentoring, and a lot of help and trial and error.

Becky: And Alan's book,

Dannielle: Alan's book is really important at this point. [laughs]

Jeff: We're coming up to the end of our time, and I just want to restate Alan has written a book about this, full of diagrams, pictures. The title of the book is The History of Keeping and Managing Double and Two-QueenHives. I really encourage, if you have any interest in it, to do some more research, listen to our past podcast with Tom Theobald.

It's been a pleasure having you both on the show talking about two-- Oh, wait, wait, wait. Stop. Put the break on everything. I need to ask one question in two minutes or less. How do you think varroa is going to impact two-queen hives?

Alan: Well, we don't have DWV for a start. The CSIRO researchers said that beekeeping in New Guinea, in the Solomon Islands, they've got both varroa and tropilaelaps. I suspect also Acarapis as well. They're managing quite well. Initially, they lost a lot of hives, and they've now settled down. Without DWV, I don't know. Hives are falling over in places like Sydney and Newcastle, like they were going out of fashion. The small hive beetles taking over the hives, we have a major problem with that. These are also absconding entirely, which Randy Oliver tells me happens in Hawaii. The bees just take off. They'll leave all the brood and all the stores behind. They get so itchy, they take off.

I don't know, but I do know that beekeepers in Mexico and other places, and we talk about this in the book, actually turn to two queens to overcome some of the problems they had. You can do things like run a lot of drone brood in a two-queen hive and pull a lot of drone brood out. Probably, that mechanism is one that you could use to run two-queen hives. They apparently do still produce more honey, but I don't know how they control the varroa. I don't know. Perhaps you could tell us.

Dannielle: I know that was already two minutes. [laughter] I will say for the double-queen method, the one where I had the upside-down tee and the nuc covers on the side. For all the mechanical methods for managing varroa, like cutting out drone comb, queen isolation in a pocket on the side, it's a lot easier to just open up those hives and get to the brood, because all you have to do is pull open those nuc covers on the side and you're there in the brood. You don't have to lift all the other supers and everything else on top. If you need to just go and grab the drone comb frame that you've been using, and you just do that, you put it back in, it's quite easy that way compared to a more traditional stack of these.

Jeff: I wish for you the best as this pest continues its way across Australia. We'll have to check back with you and see how things are going. I really appreciate you staying up so late to talk with us and look forward to talking to you again down the road.

Becky: Oh, such great information and such great beekeepers. I really appreciate the conversation, both of you.

[music]

Dannielle: Thank you. It's been a pleasure to be here.

Alan: Thank you. Thank you very much for having us. That's wonderful. Thank you, Jeremy Burbidge.

Jeff: Becky, two-queen systems is always fascinating to me ever since meeting with Tom Theobald. Talking with Dannielle and Alan, boy, it just seems like it'd be a fun experiment to do one of these seasons.

Becky: I agree. I think that it's one of those tools that beekeepers have that they probably don't use a lot, but if done right, it can really maybe make your apiary a little bit more productive and a lot more interesting.

Jeff: Well, that's what I was thinking. Dannielle was talking about being an urban beekeeper where she lives. If you were limited on space and you were an urban beekeeper and you did have only maybe permission to have one colony on your little plot of land, maybe I might have a new place I'm living. Technically, it's one box, but you could have multiple systems there going and two queens and keep the fun going, and it's something worthwhile. I think we're going to have to have them back.

Becky: I would love that. I think they've got a lot more information they can share with us and our listeners, but I kind of want to hear it. [laughs] That book too, I'm really interested in Alan's book.

Jeff: It's a good read.

Becky: Pretty exciting stuff.

Jeff: Well, that about wraps it up for this episode. Before we go, I want to encourage our listeners to follow us and rate us five stars on Apple Podcasts or wherever you download and stream the show. Even better, write a review and let other beekeepers looking for a new podcast know what you like. You can get there directly from our website by clicking on the reviews tab along the top of any webpage.

We want to thank Betterbee and our regular long-time sponsors, Global Patties, Strong Microbials, and Northern Bee Books, for their generous support. Finally, and most importantly, we want to thank you, the Beekeeping Today Podcast listener, for joining us on this show. Feel free to leave us questions and comments on our website. We'd love to hear from you. Thanks a lot, everybody.

[00:49:41] [END OF AUDIO]