Should You Double Brood Your Bees? A Clear Guide To When Double Brood Helps And When It Doesn't

Is it a good idea to have your bees on a double brood configuration? I am a massive fan of double brood, but double brood does not solve all of your problems. There's a time of the year to do it, and there's a time of the year where it's really not a good idea to do it. In this video, we're going to talk all about double brood, what colonies it suits, when to use it, but like I said, most importantly, when not to use Now, if you're using a prolific Buckfast bee and you're on a standard national configuration, so not the 14x12 but just the standard national deep configuration, a double brood configuration is a very, very good idea for you. I find managing prolific Buckfast bees in a single national brood box is very, very difficult. I wouldn't say that it's impossible, but I would say you are setting yourself up for a lot more work in terms of swarm management throughout the season. Now, if you're just watching this video and interested about bees, F1 Buckfast bees from Black Mountain Honey, super, super chilled. You can just sit here outside. I've got 15, 20 colonies in this apiary and they don't care about me being here at all. I'm what, 6 inches, 8 inches away from the entrance of this hive here? Super, super chilled bees. So blackmountainhoney.co.uk is where you want to go to get your F1 Buckfast queens. And you will see from behind me that these bees here, they are on a double brood configuration. It's not a standard double brood, it's a 14 by 12 with a National Deep above it. But I see a lot of people Building up their nucs, getting a nuc, say, in, in May or June, building it up to a single brood, and then thinking, well, the right thing to do is to put another brood box on because they're prolific bees and I want to make sure that they've got enough space. Now, it all comes down to your management system throughout the year. I would say there's 3 main aims for a beekeeper. Don't let your bees swarm, make sure they've not got disease or pests that are causing them issues, and ensure that they are always well fed so that they do not starve. Nail those 3 rules and you will do very well as a beekeeper, but it's not that simple, and the first one I find is the most difficult one of all of those. Now, managing bees in a single National Brood Box throughout the whole season using a prolific colony of Buckfast bees, you will almost certainly get to a point, probably around May or June, where the bees start creating swarm cells. Now, once the bees have started creating swarm cells, there is only one option that you have. One option. Don't let anybody tell you that there is more than one option. The option there is to make a split. Simple as that. There is nothing more that you can do. Don't try doing demerays once the bees have started creating swarm cells, because all they will do is that they will just continue to swarm, and then you're in a really awkward configuration. Now, the bees at that point in the year, if they're on a single brood box, will have swarmed probably for one Simple reason, and that reason is that the bees have been congested in the brood box. So double brood early on in the year is a really, really good idea. Get a 6-frame nuc in April, build it up, it fills up that first brood box, and then for me, straight away put another brood box on top. That way the bees are building up really nice and strong, they're not limited for space in the brood area, the queen has got plenty of space to lay, and then by the time you've filled up that double brood box, you're probably going to get to the point where you're just there or thereabouts the June gap. So in the UK, that's late May, early June, where there's a gap in the nectar flow. And at that point, that's an excellent point to go in and put your queen excluder on and put your supers on. Not much longer after that, you're going to get the summer solstice, which triggers to the queen to say, right, stop laying as much, the days are getting shorter, stop expanding the brood nest, and we're going to focus on honey to make sure that we've got enough stores to get through the winter. And with that configuration there, you've navigated the awkward swarmy part of the season to ensure that the bees have got sufficient space in the brood box. Now, what some people will do as an added bonus or a way to try and get additional honey out is that later on in the year, they will go and move the queen excluder from up here above the double brood and put it down in between the 2 brood boxes, ensuring that the queen is down here and all of the brood that is up here will emerge And then they will just continue rearing the brood nest down here, and that box there will turn into a super. It's a little bit of a gamble doing that, but it will result in a far superior honey crop. Really, really good way to do it. But let's flip it on its head. If you've got a single nuc of bees that you've built up to fill a brood box, say the middle of July, and you're thinking, well, I don't want my bees to swarm, so I'm going to put another brood box on, I would say that's really, really bad advice. And it's exactly the same advice And it's exactly the same advice that I give to people early on in the year, so surely if it's the good advice to do in April or May, it's the right advice in June or July. And it's not, because the bees are set up in such a completely different way at that point in the season. Now, putting a brood box on in the middle of July as a second brood box is not the end of the world. You're not going to kill your bees, it's not going to do any damage to the bees, the bees will probably quite like it. But all they will do is they will just see that additional box as a place to put honey. That's all they're going to do. So in my view, you might as well just put a queen excluder on and put some supers on and actually extract the honey. That's a far simpler way of doing it. The bees will be happy with that as long as when you take the honey off at the end of the year, you replace it with a decent amount of stores. Now moving into the winter period and into the spring for next year, double brood kind of changes and morphs into a slightly different way again. If I took this colony here as a double brood configuration into the winter, This is how they would set themselves up without any queen excluder or anything. They would have all of the brood downstairs in this bottom box, and upstairs there would be lots and lots of honey. So if I went in in September, that's what you would find— brood down here, honey upstairs. Now if I was to go back in, in say February or March, you get a completely different colony setup. So the colony will cluster up down here, and then as it goes through the winter, it moves up to the top and ends up at the top of the box Later on in the season, so say February or March, it leaves this bottom box completely empty. Now what I like to do, and this gives you way more flexibility for later on in the season, is at that point, February, March, come into your bees, and you could be checking bees at the moment, you're just checking to see if they've got enough stores, you can just crack open the top there, see where the bees are. If the bottom box is empty, just take the bottom box away. Completely remove it. Start the season again on a single brood because it gives you that flexibility again to do different things. Now, a slightly different approach that I've taken in previous years that I used before I did the Demaray, and I'll just quickly summarize the Demaray at the end of this video as well because that's a slight tweak on a double brood configuration. But what I used to do was take this bottom box away, start the year off on a single brood, push my bees as far as I could possibly go throughout that swarming period. Get 2 or 3 supers worth of honey, and then when I got to the June gap, I'd take the honey off, I'd put on my second brood box underneath, and I'd put a feeder on. And I would use that June gap period to make the most of bees sitting around doing nothing because there's no forage out, to get my second brood box drawn out. Now, I wasn't feeding them for them to store any honey in there, but I was just putting a second brood box on in order for them to draw out all of that comb Which meant that I'd go into that late summer season with a really nice big brood nest. Probably sacrifice a little bit of honey doing that. But then what I would do is I would add in that queen excluder shift once I'd got a couple of weeks past the summer solstice. There's loads and loads and loads of different ways to manage your bees, but you need to try and work with them and think, what are the bees doing at the moment? Here's a simple way to remember. Before the summer solstice, the bees are expanding their brood nest. Give them additional space in the brood nest if they need it. After the summer solstice, maybe 3 3 or 4 weeks after the summer solstice, the brood nest is contracting. So if you need to, take space away, but definitely do not add additional brood space to the brood nest because the bees don't need it. Now, the Demarais split is a single brood box management system that occasionally morphs into a double brood box management system. You're taking the brood box that's at the bottom, you're shifting it up to the top, taking the queen with a frame of brood, putting it back down to the bottom in a brand new brood box. It's double brewed, but it's not double brewed as we know it, and it's brewed above the honey and it's brewed below the honey as well. If you're interested in watching that video, I'll stick it up as a link here. How to stop your bees swarming. It's a really, really good technique, and it's a technique that I pretty much exclusively use now. I hope that video was useful. I just wanted to talk to you a little bit about double brooding because I see a lot of people double brooding maybe what I deem to be the wrong time of the year. It works well early on in the season. It's a waste of time late on in the season. Keep your brood boxes for when you really need them most.