![]() ![]() The supers are stacked on top of the queen excluder and covered with a single lid. A pair of half-width lids cover the exterior side of each brood nest. It is worth spending a minute to level the bases and ensure the single-queen excluder fits across the top of the interior side of both brood nests. The horizontal two-queen colony is easy to set up, provided you have adjacent hives with brood nests of equal height. Whether this horizontal two-queen configuration is viewed as 2 colonies with shared supers or a single colony with 2 broodnests is debatable, but its capacity to yield large amounts of honey is not in question. This configuration intuitively feels like two hives from a management and record keeping perspective, but a single unit from a production and harvest standpoint. However, there is a stack of shared supers in the middle, instead of each brood nest having its own stack. Looking at the colony, it appears as two separate but adjacent brood nests, just as two regular colonies would. This is generally referred to as a horizontal two-queen system. The abundance of supers on top make even a cursory brood inspection an exercise in heavy lifting.Īn alternative to the vertical two-queen system is to arrange two brood nests side by side with supers in the middle. Productive vertical two-queen colonies can reach heights that lead to instability and awkward lifts. While it seems that the bees fare well in this arrangement, it can quickly become unwieldy for the beekeeper as the height of the colony increases. ![]() I have most commonly come across two-queen hives in a vertical configuration. This can lead to enormous forces of foragers capable of producing large honey crops when nectar is available. By having two prolific queens laying simultaneously, the total colony population can reach over 100,000 bees, while the population of a single-queen colony generally tops out around 60,000 bees. Instead, methods have been developed that allow two queens to coexist in a single hive, as long as they occupy separate spaces and remain separated by employing a queen excluder.įrom a beekeeper’s perspective, the primary benefit to two-queen colonies is increased honey production. Beekeepers know if they tried to force a scenario of two queens simultaneously roaming the same brood frames by introducing an additional queen to a queenright colony, the new queen would almost certainly be balled and dispatched by the resident bees. Neither is it possible to know the exact pheromone conditions that result in the toleration of two queens. In hives where two queens are found occupying the same space, it is not possible to easily determine if one is dominant, laying the majority of eggs. Somewhere along the way, inventive beekeepers started straying from the conventional wisdom of “one queen per hive” and exploring two-queen hives with a variety of methods. The colony is the unit, living in a hive of its own, discrete from the other colonies in the apiary, aside from drifting foragers or robbing bees. Another thing you learn very early in beekeeping is that a single stack of boxes represents a single colony. While this is surely true in the vast majority of colonies, I have seen two queens coexisting enough times-and even once found three in a single brood box-to know that the things we beekeepers know as rules may only be viewed as guidelines by the bees themselves. One of the first things beekeepers learn, often even before getting bees, is that a colony has many bees but just a single queen. ![]()
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