Rose Hive Method Episode 2

A comparison of the Rose Hive Method with the performance of hives managed as traditional Nationals.

As the season is progressing we're seeing some clear pros and cons to the Rose method and one size boxes, and we're also tracking the performance of the hives to see if there's an obvious difference in build up and productivity, as well as varroa numbers and tolerance.

Advantages

• As swarming season has started and we also want to increase our number of hives, the one size boxes have generally been great. The ability to do walkaway splits by simply putting any box with QCs or young brood onto a new floor is great, as is the ability to move frames with brood/QCs from and to any box.

• The contrast with messing around looking for brood boxes, supers and corresponding frames is stark.

• With brood in multiple boxes it's actually easier to get a decent idea if the colony is thinking of swarming. This is done by cracking the boxes like opening a suitcase, and looking at the bottom of the frames where a good percentage of the QCs will be found (however, see below).

Disadvantages

• Having no queen excluder is not too much of a problem 95% of the time, but when you really need to find the queen in a busy hive it can be. In this system the queen MUST be marked. I had to go through a hive of 4 busy boxes three times to find the queen, which took a very long time (as she wasn't marked - lesson learned).

• If you really want/need to avoid swarms it's obviously a lot harder to find absolutely every QC with brood in multiple boxes. We accept losing the occasional swarm, so it doesn't bother us too much.

Performance

We picked two of each to follow, purely based on them being established hives and convenient for us. Over the season we'll keep a log of how many frames of brood there are on each hive, and ultimately how much honey they produce.

So far there's no massive difference in rate of build up or amount of stores, but we'll reserve judgement until at least the end of July. It's been a cold wet start to the season here until mid-May, so hives that have come out of winter fairly small have really struggled to get going. That has been followed by a crazy swarm season in late May, so a lot can change. On the plus side, the June gap doesn't look like it's going to be anywhere near as bad as last year's was.

Varroa

In spite of not treating we're seeing very low varroa loads so far, less than 2 per day in all of our hives and generally much lower than that. Again, we'll see how much that changes as the colonies build up.

We'll do another update at the end of June and let you know how things are progressing.