Beekeeping > General Beekeeping

Tall Hives and 2 Queen Hives

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Crofter:
I am kicking around the idea of doing a couple of 2 queen hives with an old twist; the Snelgrove Board. Google Dave Cushman Snelgrove Board

It makes for a very tall hive with the honey supers sandwiched in the middle of the stack which seems inconvenient as heck. It would be too except I plan to put a section of scaffolding between the two hives which gives me moveable stages up to 5 feet high and lots of laydown space for boxes. I had one hive get very tall last year as I left all supers on and added a few more to try and get more drawn comb. Anway it looked impressive but i had to use a stepladder to get supers down.

The Snelgrove system puts almost all brood above a screened floor and the bees there will produce queen cells you can harvest and let one mature and start a colony up above. The exists can be manipulated to selectively bleed forager bees down to the lower box with the old queen. This separation of the old queen from most of the brood acts like the demarree swarm control method. In theory it keeps both queens from swarming and you can remove the upper box as a complete hive or pinch the old queen and combine the two hives without any newspaper since they have the same smell.

Riverrat:
I often wanted to experiment with the snelgrove board not sure why I haven't

Jen:
I'm excited to see how this works for you. In my case, I wouldn't be stable on ladders to bring the supers down for inspection.

Crofter:
Yes the ladder business would be a definite put off. It could be run as low as one deep, plus two honey supers, plus the second deep on top. That would be less than what I have in the picture. I did get 4 medium supers filled and capped by that hive.

What I am proposing to do with a more or less permanent section of scaffold between two hives would give a much more forgiving scenario to work the hives. I dont think it is practical but would be a fun thing to do.  If it gives good swarm control, provides re queening and gives good honey production that will all be a plus

riverbee:
good luck crofter on that endeavor, have never tried the snelgrove myself, but have worked taking supers off from ladders and scaffolding.  in a good year i can have a pretty good stack on, and takes two of us to get them off.  a board between 2 ladders works really well.

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