Rose Hive Method Episode 3

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

This month has seen a lot more activity and added some more experience to the experiment.

The Rose Method described in Tim Rowe's book recommends that until mid-summer (21st June) new boxes are added in the middle of the brood nest to allow easy expansion without the bees having to move the pollen and honey above the brood out of the way. After mid-summer the number of bees has reached its maximum, so further boxes should then be added above the nest for honey storage.

I've done this, but our bees are not especially prolific and in several hives what has actually happened is that rather than just expanding, the brood nest has also moved up the hive leaving an empty space at the bottom of the hive. I don't think the absence of a queen excluder (QE) is the key factor here, rather, there is no point adding more boxes in the brood nest than your bees will use, so next year for mine I think I will try adding only one box in the centre, then any further boxes added above the brood nest. If you have really prolific bees your situation may differ; watching Tim's videos, his Irish bee colonies certainly seemed to get far bigger than mine do.

Advantages

• The simplicity of moving frames from hive to hive or box to box has continued to be really useful. A couple of times it's been necessary to move a frame of brood to another hive, and all being the same box has been great.

Disadvantages

• Weight - the Rose boxes are heavy when empty and bigger than a super, so contain more honey when full. These are heavy! The sides of the Rose box are one solid, thick piece of wood (as seen below) rather than two bars and a thin wall in a National box. If I buy more I plan to ask Thornes to cut a bigger hand hold to reduce the weight of wood in that piece.

• We did a small extraction of Spring honey in June. I had checked the previous week and the box was full of honey, but when I came to harvest it the queen had laid on several frames, so you just need to double check. The flip side is that it's easy to take a frame of honey from anywhere else in the hive to make up a full frame of honey

Performance

The performance of the hives has been really hard to track due to taking frames and bees for splits, swarms leaving, supersedures etc. Also, two of each type is hardly science, although across all of our hives the Rose hives seem to be bigger on average. The numbers below seem to suggest that brood size has peaked, as expected, providing the maximum number of bees in July for the main flow. From now on, instead of brood, the performance measurement will be quantity of honey, followed by size of colony going into winter (and coming out next spring).

Varroa

Despite now being at near peak numbers of brood and bees, we still have no hives with a drop level of more than 2/day and the vast majority have <1/day. There is no obvious difference between varroa levels in our Nationals or Rose hives.

Next update at the end of July. Fingers crossed for a great flow this year!