New hives for today's superbee

[hedgerow pete]

this is where i kept hitting a brick wall,in a way just to cap the thread,

you want a single brood box for speed and ease but you dont want to have frames two foot square, and this is where i left the thread last time, i strongly belive that these newer F1 hybrids need a larger than normal box

but at some point there is only so much queen scent and as such to big and they will just swarm or split anyway, i was hoping to get an informed debate going but apart from jcbrum who worked out some great frame construction sizes it was mainly me doing all the research and trying to put a practical edge to it,

there is a theoretical maxium size that a queens scent will pass through the hive, go past this and they swarm or requeen thinking shes gone,

also if you make the frames to large they will colapse when lifted thats if you can lift them
i also needed to find out the average egg laying rate of a F1 hybrid, but when you ask anyone all you get is someone bitching at you when i pointed out there idea of thier queen laying over and filling 11 frames in a week a little off the mark,but no one has the want to help out they just either pass comments helpfull or not and just sit and watch, if you have a look through the other threads there was a rather large disscussion about my hatred of these newer F1 hybrids this spring. but where as i put my results on line and have to justify them i see that none of my detractors have done so, either they are bored of stabbing me or i have truely produced massive results from simple bees and great mothering of hives

it does make you wonder some times

 

[Crg]

but at some point there is only so much queen scent and as such to big and they will just swarm or split anyway

I'm not sure where you get that idea. There's plenty of bees bred to be prolific and also to be less inclined to swarm.

With well bred queens I think you'll hit the limit of how many eggs the queen can lay - not the limit of how far her scent will go.

i also needed to find out the average egg laying rate of a F1 hybrid

How long is a piece of string? F1 hybrid with what strains/breed?

 

[hedgerow pete]

you see this is the crutch of the problem no one knows what they have, as for the scent dont discount it it is very important to hold the hive together, and as for the egg laying i know my lot deliver around the 500 mark because i have measured it several times to check , but most beeks now dont so this is where i need information, and again back to my rant about putting in but no one else is

 

[Crg]

you see this is the crutch of the problem no one knows what they have, as for the scent dont discount it it is very important to hold the hive together, and as for the egg laying i know my lot deliver around the 500 mark because i have measured it several times to check , but most beeks now dont so this is where i need information, and again back to my rant about putting in but no one else is

I know how important the queen pheromones are, I'm just saying I haven't personally seen any reason to worry about there being too many bees for the queen. Even in artificially increased numbers of bees using two queens systems (after it's been reduced to one queen but same amount of bees).

As for queen laying you talk about F1 hybrid - but a hybrid between different strains/breeds can have vastly different egg laying rates. In studies I've seen 2000 eggs a day seems to be the generally accepted egg laying rate. Other people (www.beesource.com) claim up to 3000 eggs a day is possible.

 

[hedgerow pete]

see this again i struggle with
i have an old type of bee, she can lay around the 500 mark a day when on full flow i know because i have measured the egg areas, and she is a good layer to me

now lets talk about your 2000 not evan the 3,000 but the 2,000 and lets stick some numbers to it

24 hours per day times 60 minutes per hour total minites per day 1,440 so you bee is laying eggs less than every minute(43 seconds) with out breaks or does she only work a 12 hour shift in which case thats one every 21.6 seconds, i am sorry but these numbers realy are hard for me to except as plausable, unless some one with a phd or docter bee tells me i have my concerns about other forum posters and there idea of 3,000 eggs per day lay rates,

see the main point is the hives we are using any of them all have at least 50 to 100 years of history, when men where men and bees wore clogs sort of thing i truely belive that evan by bees are sometimes cramped in a 12 by 14 national and these are old fart bees, i have had to deal with 40 plus problems this year mainly but not all several old bee keeps where caught out with using a newer or evan true F1 bees, yes they were soft to work with, yes they were very easy to deal with but had breed so much that they had exploded so quickly they all had either swarmed and left a brood box full of eggs an grubs or had moved into a double brood box (12 x 14) and two supers and where still over fllowing we ended up spliting it into three very large nucs and adding two new queens this guy had only wanted on hive maybe two , when i left he had three and further on this year we split it again and now the poor sod has 6, so i realy belive that we need to organize and build a newer and larger hive brood area, where as i belive it should be a single big box with a plate on top so we can still use our national supers untill we get to have newer super frames

so what are your points. if you have read the whole thread you should have some ideas surely?

 

[RoofTops]

You could estimate the daily rate of egg production if you know roughly how many bees there are in the hive and how long on average they live for.

Taking figures often banded about, if there are 50,000 bees in the hive and they live for 6 weeks in summer then the queen has to lay about 1,200 eggs per day in order to maintain that population. Of course the population isn't static but it gives us a starting point.

If a queen only lays 500 eggs per day and the hive still has 50,000 bees then the bees have to live about 14 weeks, which is a lot longer than they are supposed to live in the summer but I have no evidence to suggest it is not possible. The alternative is the bees live a shorter life and the overall population is lower - and therefore probably don't need as large a hive. For example, if they live 8 weeks and the queen is laying 500 per day then the hive population will be about 28,000. This fits with the concept that AMM bees can be kept in a single National brood box yet still bring in huge crops. They aren't spending all their time brood rearing but spend a proportionally much greater part of their life out collecting nectar.

Not sure where the above leads us but given the queen's egg laying slows down from time to time, usually due to bad weather or lack of forage then I find it quite plausible in non-AMM bees that the queens maximum laying rate can be of the order of 2,000 per day which is needed to achieve the average required. I have been to a talk about this and there seems to be good evidence that queens can lay at this rate and the extraordinary thing is the eggs amount to several times her own body weight per day.

 

[hedgerow pete]

i personal would say my hives dont yep thats read right DONT get over 30,000 i have seen hives and have wieghed them and a hive of 50,000 is very very big,

 

[Crg]

some one with a phd or docter bee tells me i have my concerns about other forum posters and there idea of 3,000 eggs per day lay rates

There is plenty of research papers on this.

i realy belive that we need to organize and build a newer and larger hive brood area, where as i belive it should be a single big box with a plate on top so we can still use our national supers untill we get to have newer super frames

I build and use "buckfast" dadant - single brood box, and seems to be enough room.

 

[hedgerow pete]

to me personaly i think dadants are massive and more than capable of housing bee but are they big enough to house a modern F1 hybrid i dont think they are

 

[Norton]

Egg laying rates

i also needed to find out the average egg laying rate of a F1 hybrid

Hello,
The average maximum egg laying is about 1,500/day - rarely goes up to 1,800 and that only is for certain strains - like the old Starline strain from the USA. It has been calculated many times by different researchers. Any claims of 3,000/day should be taken that there are 2 queens laying in the hive, up to 20% of the colonies in an apiary can have 2 queens. If you carefully measure the total brood area in a hive you will find that it is rarely more than 5 FULL Langstroth frames. There are approximately 6,000 cells on both comb surfaces:
5x6,000/21=1,428.
Best regards
Norton.

 

[Crg]

to me personaly i think dadants are massive and more than capable of housing bee but are they big enough to house a modern F1 hybrid i dont think they are

I've found 12 frame dadants to be big enough for all bee types I've kept.

Exactly which F1 hybrids do you think it wouldn't be big enough for?