How Underbrooding In Spring - Boost Your Honey Harvest And Stop Swarming

If you want to double brood your colonies early on in the season, do not put the brood box on top of the original brood box. Do it this way instead and you will save your bees and build up way, way faster. So if you're trying to build up your colonies to make as many splits as possible in the year, my advice to people is don't split the bees too early. Build them up on a double brood configuration, so that's 2 brood boxes, and once they fill those 2 brood boxes, Then go away and you can make as many splits as you want. 2 brood boxes is going to be around 22 frames of bees and honey and brood, and you can easily split that down into 3-frame nucs, and that will give you 7 3-frame nucs, which at that point of the year you can take away to a different apiary, add a mated queen in there, and they're going to be at no risk of wasp attack or robbing from other bees. But if you listen to that advice in layman's terms, it sounds like what I'm saying is for you to take off your crown board, take off your roof, And to place an additional brood box of either drawn comb or foundation and frames on top of the other brood box, and then to put your feeder back on there. Now that configuration is a really, really poor spring configuration for 2 reasons. One, all of the heat that is in the brood area is lost upwards into a big void, so you're giving your bees a really, really difficult problem of heating that increased space, and all of the heat goes to where the bees The second problem is that you're moving the feeder away from the bees by about 12 to 14 inches depending on the size of your box. Now flipping it around the other way makes so much sense for the opposite of those 2 disadvantages. If you take your brood box and you lift it up with the roof, with the feeder, with your crown board, with everything intact, and you place the new brood box underneath, what that means is that the feeder is still In situ, as close to the brood area as possible, which is essential for strong, fast spring buildup to stimulate that queen and to get her going. And then it gives you 2 additional heating benefits. One is that the brood area sits at the very top of that big cylindrical or rectangular void that you've created. It means that all of the heat is rising up to where the bees are actually living. Bees in the spring need warmth in order to create brood and to care for brood. The secondary benefit that you get from that as well is by moving where the bees are away from the entrance, away from a potentially open mesh floor, you reduce the wind coming into your colony as well, so you don't get any wind chill. What that means is that the bees will build more brood on each frame because it's further away from the area that they deem to be too cold to rear brood. If you're going down this configuration, you want to start feeding your bees from pretty Pretty much any point now. So we're middle of March at the moment, 16th or 17th of March. I would say now is a good time to start feeding your bees little and often, sugar syrup, 1:1 sugar syrup, and I would maybe go with like half a litre every day or so. Don't give your bees 10 litres and expect them to take it down at this point of the year, it's not going to happen. Give them a little and often, it simulates a nectar flow and that stimulates the queen. I would recommend at this point as well using something like Hive Alive. It's good to get your colonies going, but even better to stop any mould forming in that syrup if the bees are reluctant to go up, for example, for a few days at a time. Double brood in the spring is the best way to get the absolute maximum value from your colonies. Prepare them for splits, but make sure you do it the right way round.