1 + 1 = 3 ?

[Chiangmai member]

The nectar flow is coming to an end in Northern Thailand. Its been quite a good year with heavy flowering of mangoes, lychees and longan trees. (Forget what I wrote a while back about bees not appearing to like mango flowers).

A few months back I wrote on the forum about the differences between temperate and tropical A. mellifera population dynamics. In Thailand, we cannot get the exponential growth in bee numbers in advance of the nectar flows, that one sees in northern Europe in the spring. In Thailand, queens lay year-round and worker populations tend to stay stable throughout the year, making it difficult to achieve significant increase.

A commercial bee keeping friend told me that what he does is combine two strong colonies, about 6 weeks before the nectar flow is expected. He thought that whilst two seperate colonies might produce a total of 20 kg of honey, combining two colonies might produce around 30 kg.

In February, we tried this idea out with one of the colonies we keep at home. We took two 8 frame colonies from single Tawianese box colonies and combined them into a Langstroth with 2 supers. The spare queen was moved to a nuc in the out apiary.

To date, this single hive has produced more than 50 kg of good quality honey; 90% capped with virtually no brood on any of the frames. (We may have struck a bit lucky, as the queen was 2 years old and due to be replaced soon). Its possible that we may be able to harvest a few more frames, towards the end of April. We are very pleased with this result.

I am thinking that a possible reason that this seems to work is that combining two strong colonies may imitate the exponential growth in bees that one sees in european colonies in the spring, resulting in reduced laying by the queen and increased foraging activity, when it matters.

Of course we have no way of knowing whether we would have got 25kg from each of the two colonies, had we not combined them, but my gut feeling is that we would have got less.

So my question is this..... Can 1 + 1 =3 ?

Any thoughts?

 

[REDWOOD]

I think some call it the nuc bomb affect due to the fact whenever a colony gets a few extra frames of brood they explode.

 

[enrico]

No theories but love reading your posts! Fascinating how different bees can be in two different countries!

 

[itma]

Large colonies will produce disproportionately more surplus than the same number of bees in separate colonies -- if -- the queen is able to hold together the large colony without them swarming (and this will vary greatly with the strain of bee).

I think of it as the colony having an amount of "fixed costs" and any income beyond that going straight through to bottom-line profit. So, boosting the worker numbers increases the profit dramatically.

 

[BeeJayBee]

In February, we tried this idea out with one of the colonies we keep at home. We took two 8 frame colonies from single Tawianese box colonies and combined them into a Langstroth with 2 supers. The spare queen was moved to a nuc in the out apiary.

To date, this single hive has produced more than 50 kg of good quality honey; 90% capped with virtually no brood on any of the frames. (We may have struck a bit lucky, as the queen was 2 years old and due to be replaced soon). Its possible that we may be able to harvest a few more frames, towards the end of April. We are very pleased with this result.

I am thinking that a possible reason that this seems to work is that combining two strong colonies may imitate the exponential growth in bees that one sees in european colonies in the spring, resulting in reduced laying by the queen and increased foraging activity, when it matters.

Somewhere on the forum there's mention of putting two colonies together, one above the supers with its' own upper entrance. Might have the same result, but would be a bit unwieldy.

Edit : this thread http://www.beekeepingforum.co.uk/showthread.php?t=21532