Keeping Bees In Single Deep Brood Boxes

May I have your attention, please? The following is not the real Jeff Foxworthy. If when you get stung by a bee, you apologize because you did something wrong, you might be a beekeeper. If you have lost more than five hive tools and your lawnmower has found two of them, you might... Be a beekeeper. If you have replaced the grass on your front lawn with clover, you might love bees. Welcome, welcome to Be Love Beekeeping presented by our great friends over at Man Lake.

We have a fun program today as we're going to learn about beekeeping in single deep brew boxes with John Stevens up in northern Michigan. Does it make sense in cold climates? How about warm weather? One of the things I love about beekeeping is we can learn from others, then we need to make decisions about what's going to be the best for our bees. Knowledge plus experience. plus intuition, hard work, and an open mind makes

great beekeepers and happy bees. Hey, it's been a while since we've had some new honeybee fun facts, so let's get started with a few interesting tidbits about drone bees. Did you know that drones have larger eyes on top of their heads to help them identify queens during mating season? Did

you know that during the mating period colonies can have as much as 10 to 15 % drones in their hives? So imagine a hive with 40 ,000 bees, that's like 4 to 6 ,000 drones. Did you know that drones don't have stingers? Did you know that during the mating period as many as 25 ,000 drones from dozens of different hives will meet in a drone congregation area? to mate with queens from surrounding hives? And as a follow -up, did you know that only a handful ever get to mate with a queen?

Those that do die immediately afterwards? The rest, well, they live for about a month flying out each warm day in search of a queen to mate with. Did you know that virgin queens typically mate with 10 to 20 different drones? It could even be more than that. And that mating happens in midair? And maybe the worst part, did you know that once fall comes, the worker bees will kick the drones out of the hive in what is known as the expulsion of the drones. There you have

the bees part of the birds and the bees. We have a fun guest interview today and a wild and crazy beekeeping story that has something to do with grandpa and his boxer shorts. Let's welcome to

the show today John Stevens coming to us from Michigan in the US. How are you John? I am fine. I got a day off from being stung. Oh Or a little bit of time off from being stung. So that's always good I hope that was our chat here today that's saving you from being stung. I want some of the credit. Oh, yeah Yeah, I got 40 nukes out there in the back be yard that I need to go into mark their new queen. So I got to go in, mark all the queens and then add a second box to the new

today. So I will probably be stung here in a little while after we finish. Well, you're allowed to wear protective gear. Yeah, but our day, our temperatures right now are running low 90s. So you wear minimal gear right now and marking queens, you're bare handed. So yeah, absolutely. We're going to get into a little bit about where you be keep and what it's like and how hard your winners are and some of that kind of stuff. But since you jumped into what you're doing today,

I want to hear all about that. So when did you create these nukes and how did you raise the Queens? Give us some background. Well, the Queens just kind of fell into my lap. A friend of mine up the road, he runs roughly 1100 hikes or so. He ordered 400 queens and ended up only using 300 of them. So he called me to try to get rid of some of the excess and I ended up buying 40 off of him. I got a really good deal. So then, yeah, I just ran around and see, I run all single

deep management style hive. So I have to be in them. I have to be pulling brood out. So it kind of coincided with me keeping them throttled back, pulling brood out, waiting for the main nectar flow. And so here I had all this brood and just happened to get all these queens and put together all these new. Nice. And you run about 170 hives? Yeah. Right now we're just at that. Generally by the main honey flow, I should have about 175, 180 production hives. Our main flow doesn't start

for maybe another two weeks. Another week and a half, two weeks. The basswood, Russian thistle, or knapweed, whatever you want to call it. We have a lot of thistle around here. I don't know the term knapweed. Is that the same as thistle? Yeah, it's like it's of the thistle family. But around here, it was called star thistle, if you've ever heard of star thistle honey. But really,

it's Russian knapweed. Or anything like that, but it is a honey producing crop for us big time So we're just waiting for that bloom usually around the fourth of July a little after Now you mentioned that you run all single deeps. Give me an idea of why because even though I you know, I'm only a hundred and seventy five hundred and eighty hives I Consider myself kind of a commercial honey producer. I am in it for the honey and a single deep will produce more

honey than running a double. Double deeps, they, you know, they store a lot in the double deep to start with. Good 35, 40 pounds each. And with a single, you're putting that honey super right on top of that brood nest and they just put everything up above it. So of course your honey production increases. And when it comes time to find a queen, see what's going on, doing any checks, it's one box. So it really cuts down on the labor and doing inspections and stuff like that. So I assume

you use queen excluders. Oh, yeah. You have to. Or else it's not single brood management. It would be single deep into medium management. Yeah. And that's another thing I don't have. really brood comb in my honey supers and stuff, you know, so it's It just keeps your honey supers clean Get a little pollen now and then and how much more maintenance does it take to keep everything

just in one brood box? Yeah, I tell a lot of new beekeepers because they see that I run singles and It's like they are labor intensive though because everything is so condensed into that one box They are prone to swarming, so you have to be on top of them. My schedule is I go all the way, like every nine days, through all of them hives. I'm on a rotation, my yards. Today I'll go to this yard, do everything I need to

do. I generally try to keep them at about four, maybe five frames of brood until the honey flow starts, and then it's just hands off and let

them go. So all that time, you know, I'm still, I just captured 10 virgin queens off of a frame day before yesterday. So I have to go around either later today after I get those 40 nukes done and round up. I think two of those virgins have died. So I only need like eight frames of bees to get in a nuke box and put that virgin in and see if she'll get out and get mated. So you're just pulling frames of brood anyway. You mentioned you only keep about four in a box,

right? So you're just pulling everything that's extra and putting it in nucs? Right now, that's my single deeps. Some of them could have six, seven frames of cat brood. Well, if that hive reaches maximum population before the honey flow, well, they're gone. So what I do is I just keep going in. and keeping them throttled back, you know, trying to keep the population down and just keep the hive stable until the nectar flow really starts in earnest and then just turn them

loose. And then you let it go. Yeah. That's such an interesting philosophy. I like that because it seems like most beekeepers, it's like, hey, the biggest we can do, the more bees we can do is all the better. So right, so I think that's an interesting way to do it. Yeah in a double deep, you know, they're so much more forgiving

because Queen has more real estate. They have more room to put up store, you know, I mean, it's just They're just more forgiving for that aspect but when I started seeing like Ian Stepler up in Canada There was a guy years ago Devon Ron from Canada and stuff. These guys were all doing single bird management and One year back when I first bought the poly hives, I tried like 10 or 15 singles through the winter and those poly singles all survived and my poly double

deeps had issues of, you know, dying off. So they actually overwintered better in that smaller condensed cavity. But they didn't run out of food? No, no, the poly hives create a different environment. You know, it's a field insulated cavity. Warm bees eat less honey. Same thing with your house. If your house is super insulated, your furnace will run less, less fuel. Same thing

with the bees. Now when we're ventilating the wood boxes and you know, you got air just chimneying right through them, you're losing all that heat. They're eating more. more honey to generate that heat so they do eat more. My singles generally will go through the winter here in northern Michigan on about five, maybe six frames of capped honey

in a single beat. I try to run mostly barnolian genes, you know, I go for the darker bees and Although those 40 queens were just all Italian, so I weeded those out of my operation, but now I just got them back. I think you did say mostly. Do the Italians not overwinter as well for you? Well, Italians are a better honey producer, but they go into winter with such a super large cluster that, yeah, they just don't seem to. the overwinter

as well up here. So I mean, I'll overwinter these 40 newts and then they'll probably be sold in the spring if I don't need some of them to replace dead outs or something. But I'll probably try to keep those Italian genetics out of my production. Go ahead and sell them. Yeah. So you're in, we're in Michigan. I know you're Northern somewhere. I'm Northern Michigan and right in the snow belt. You would have Traverse City, Michigan up by Traverse Bay and all that is about 30, 35 minutes

from me. And then Gaylord, Michigan, that's another big town. That's right dead center of the state. They're about another 30 minutes or so. But where I'm at in the, it is the like snow capital. Last year we had the 249 inches of snow. So my hives, literally just become bumps in the snow. I'll see the stakes of the T -post for the bare fence around the yard, and then I have to just kind of look for where the little bumps are, where the hives are. You don't worry about ventilation?

No. When I switched to the polystyrene hives, I had to throw away all my conventional beekeeping wisdom, and it just... go to a tree cavity mentality

to where the bees go into a tree cavity, it's a sealed cavity, and they go in, they stabilize it, and they control that environment. Man thinks they need all this ventilation and all this stuff. They do if they're in a box that they can't stabilize. You can take a wood box and if you build a two -inch styrofoam box that's all glued together and slip it over it, You've now mimicked a tree cavity and The bees will do great. They will

deal with any moisture. They will deal with if it's too hot too cold, you know They do it but actually I have videos because I do have a YouTube channel and I have a little video. I'm not sure if it is on YouTube though. It might just be the Northern Michigan beekeepers site but my buried hives because they are so warm inside, there's so much heat coming out the entrance that it literally melts a big cavity underneath the snow. Quick break to thank our presenting

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in my own yard. The bees love it. If you haven't already downloaded the Man Lake app, give it a try today. Oh, and by the way, it's free. The bees are able to access that cavity. For one, I'm not going to say it's super warm, but it's not super cold. So they'll come out and do cleansing trips outside the hive in that cavity that's underneath the snow. It is just amazing that I went to dig them out to do the acylic acid in winter and dig down to this big old open cavity.

How big a cavity are we talking about? Generally, my hives are two boxes on a two -way pallet. And between the two hives melting that cavity, it will be a cavity all the way across the front between the two hives, maybe a foot tall, 8 -10 inches out from the front of the hive. Super large. I mean, it is a super, super large cavity. And it just allows the bees to come out, go to the bathroom and go back in. That's amazing.

I never heard of that. There are times when my hives get completely buried in snow in the winter. And I thought it was my job to go dig out the entrance so that they could get some air. But you're saying, nah. Of course, I'm not running Polyhives, but you're a pretty good salesman for them. By the way, you're not hired by them or anything, right? We're not doing an infomercial here. No, no. OK, I'll tell you, I started with the superior brand, Superior B, which is made

in Ohio. And I went with them to start because of being American made here. And then now they've gotten a little pricey. And I now run. blue sky or the Paradise Bee box, which that was invented in Finland in 1962. So that box has been around for a long time, but I do run those now. And I know the gentleman that has started the hive IQ brand because I do presentations on these hives. So I have a sample of each one that I use. I don't run the Hive IQ because it's from

Australia and it's only a nine frame box. So my 600 honey supers don't fit on top. So I have to stick with the other brands because even though I'm running that poly hive, I run wooden honey supers all summer long. And the styrofoam lid just keeps moving up as I'm adding the boxes. Once winter comes and I pull all the honey, the lid comes back down and it's a sealed cavity. And it's one deep box and that's it all the way through winter. And summer. Any supplemental

feeding? I will feed them in the fall just to make sure that they, you know, they are up on stores. But I was telling my wife this year, I may cut back on feeding because I had so many full honey supers. honey frames in that deep in the spring that I was literally pulling frames out and putting drawn comb in just so the queen would have a place to get started up laying. It just they do not consume that much honey when they are super warm. You're kind of blowing my

mind here, John. I love it. Oh, I know. I mean, and that's why just when we think we have this figured out. A lot of the stuff I do and talk about is a lot different than what people conventionally believe. That's one thing I've learned in beekeeping is just keep open -minded because when you think you've got it figured out, something either better, different or something else comes along and we need to keep open -minded to it. You also mentioned that you treat with OA during the winter. Yeah.

Tell me about that when and how. Well, my mite protocol is basically through the summer, I don't do mite washes or anything like that. I strictly just look at drone group. My single deeps, they build most of the drone comb on the bottom of the frames. So, you know, if I'm scraping off some drone comb or something, I'm always investigating if I have mites or not through the summer. Then when I pull my honey in August, second week of August or so we get started, I will take and

drop Apivar strips at the same time. You know, I'm putting a bee escape on so the bees are coming out of the honey supers down into the single and I have the Apivar in there. Then once that runs its course, I remove that. But I know that there are bees or mites that didn't, you know, get affected. So at Thanksgiving in November, because of the warm cavity, the bees are wall

to wall moving around. There's no cluster, even if it's cold, snowy. And I will go in and do a round of acylic acid vapor on all of them. That will knock down a lot of mites. I've had monitors in hives and I know that those follies will keep brood in them until about the second week of December. So until all of that brood is emerged, I still have mites. Right, the vapor didn't take care of mites under the cap root. Under the capping, right. So I know there's going

to still be maybe a few mites in there. So I go back at Christmas and I'll do another round because everything will be emerged around the second week of December. So once I do that round, the monitor showed me that shortly after that the temperature drops in the hive to like about a 60 degree cavity temperature and they closed at that temperature until about the second week

of February. The second week of February the monitor will show that the the brood nest temperature is going back up or the ambient air in the hive and I will go back usually around Valentine's Day and do another round of acylic acid. or anything that may have survived at that point. And then

basically I come into spring pretty clean. I don't do any other mite treatments, nothing until again, I mean, if I'm going through a hive and I open some drone brood and I see mites, well, yeah, I'm gonna do something to mitigate that at the time. But for the most part, I don't see mites all summer long. Mostly fall and winter then for you. And just for our listeners that are a little newer at this, that doesn't work for everybody. It depends where you are. It depends

on your mite load. You may need to be treating sooner than that. Right. Well, what don't work for everybody is if you've got bees in a wooden box and it's five degrees outside, they are clustered as tight as a basketball. And if you blow acetic acid vapor in there, you're just dusting the outside of that cluster. You're not hitting the bees that are in the center or where the mites would be down staying warm too, you know. So it's really ineffective more or less in an uninsulated

cavity. I have videos showing opening my hives in February. No up to the top of the hive. I've dug it out, opened it up. I have four mil plastic as an inner cover so they don't glue those lids down. So you can see the bees through there and they are wall to wall, working, walking around, having a good time. I say in my presentation that bees are supposed to be able to stabilize their environment and maintain it with minimal

effort on their part. and have access to every square inch of their cavity on any given day of the year. They are not supposed to cluster height like that. If they're in a cavity that they can stabilize and maintain and do what they need to do, then they are active. But they're not active in the sense that, oh, they're gonna eat all the honey. You have to remember your winter bees have already filled their fat bodies and they're ready for winter. go through winter.

And then my stores in the singles, I don't see that drop until they start raising brood. The winter bees have went through winter. They didn't really need to eat no honey because they had stocked up their fat bodies. But then once they start raising brood, well, then they got to start dipping into the stores and everything like that. And that's another plus to the insulated cavity. is because most pollen is stored on the outside frames, you know, out towards the outer edge,

so the nurse bees have to access that. Well, if you're in a wood box that they're clustered tight and it's February and they want to start trying to raise brood, well, any pollen or anything that they need to do that better be within that cluster. Whereas in the polyhives, the insulated cavity, Nurse bees walk over a couple frames, get their pollen, whatever they need. They have access to every square inch. To me, it's a whole

different way of beekeeping. I tell people, I think for a hundred years or so, we've been keeping bees wrong, you know, with all the ventilation and moisture boards and all that stuff. And I did it for the first eight years of my beekeeping. And then every one of those eight years, I mean, I was buying bees, buying bees in the spring,

replace all the dead outs. And 11 years ago I switched to these poly hives and I have not had to buy bees in the spring since because the survival has always been good enough to make more bees and go to win -win for me. So give me an idea of the survival rate. Do you have any numbers? I went into winter last year with about 173 hives

and I think I lost 25 or 26. Nice. I don't get in the fall, I don't... usually get to every hive to make sure it's clean right and everything before going in, you know, you're cleaning out a dead out and you can see the symptoms of, oh, we had a land worker in that hive, you know, that hive just crashed because there was no queen. But as far as the actual keeping the bees warm and the bees surviving with honey and all that, how many times have you looked at a dead hive

and they're clustered? and right next to them was frames of honey. And you think, well, how come they just didn't move over there and eat that honey? Well, they were in such a cold environment, they couldn't move. Yeah. When you see bees that have starved and there's honey still in the hive, that is a very frustrating thing. Right. So yeah. And another thing that plays into this poly hive situation and being the insulated cavity is Bees need water to drink, just like every other living

creature. So, if they're in a cold wooden bot, and you are ventilating all their moisture out, you have moisture boards wicking all that moisture away, and for one though, they're clustered so tight, if there was water somewhere, they wouldn't be able to walk over and access it. For one,

it would be frozen, more likely. But I have, again, little clips, little video clips of the moisture hanging from the plastic inner cover that I have and the bees literally walking over there and taking a drink because that water is room temperature. It's the same ambient temperature, you know, of the ambient air within that cavity. They've had it stabilized. It is going to condense a little bit, but it's their drinking water. That's how they're self sustainable through the

winter. And man thinks we know what we're doing by, oh, you know, I mean, I tell northern people up here, if you think the bees could be ventilated, then go home and put a four foot square in your living room ceiling and see how comfortable you are through the winter. It ain't going to happen. Well, and you've mentioned your YouTube channel a couple of times and we'll stick a link to it in the show notes. in case people want to see some of those videos. Yeah, it's, you know, it's

just John Stevens. But I go by farmer John Stevens on Facebook. And so the YouTube channel to handle to it is at farmer John Stevens, because there's a ton of John Stevens on YouTube. But yeah, I mean, if I come across interesting stuff, I drop it on that channel and My presentation from the Michigan Beekeepers Association's fall conference, that's on there describing this polyhive concept. Okay. Last but not least, in fact, probably my favorite, John, can you give us a wild and crazy

beekeeping story that you've had? My brother -in -law, who originally got us started in beekeeping 20 years ago, his dad would always help us in the bees, and he even had a few hives of his own and stuff. But you have to understand he was probably 81 or 82 at the time. And he's out in the bee yards with us. And all of a sudden we're just hearing him going, no, no, no. And he's got a bee going up his pant leg and he wore boxer shorts. So, you know, she's got free reign

on her journey. And literally out in the bee yard, he had to drop his trousers to get that bee before she got right to the right to the point. But we were just both kind of laughing and didn't have cell phones at the time to get any video of it. But so it's just the three of you. Oh, well, it was at that time, you know, but he passed away here a few years back. Yeah, but thank goodness the whole family wasn't around to witness that. Granddaughters, things like

that. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Well, the cars driving by on the road was probably getting a show. But what's that doing, wounding everybody? Was he also running or was he just kind of jumping around to get that beat? Oh, no, he was just standing there dropping trousers, man. He was he just had to get to it fast. So yeah, bees in the pants is never fun. All right. Luckily, we didn't get video of that one. We wouldn't be able to post

it if we did, but sounds funny. And well, no father -in -law, we're not making fun of you, but thanks for bringing fun to beekeeping. Last thing, John, what do you love about honeybees? I've been doing it 20 years and they teach me something new. every year. I mean, it don't matter. You'll think you know it all and you got it and they will do something different. I don't know, just the overall experience of it. And I think with new beekeepers, one of the things is they're

afraid of their bees. They're all suited up. They got the big thick gloves on and they're just so scared of these bees and the bees sense that. And the sooner you can just say, hey, these are bees, and yeah, I might get stung, you'll become a better beekeeper of it. I'm not saying you have to go glove -less. I wear the Home Depot orange and white gloves. They got like the rubber coating on them and they're stretchy. I wear those because I follow Bob Binney, who's down

in Georgia. I follow his mantra of, if I see a queen, I mark her. You know, every queen in my operation is marked. So, I wear those gloves strictly to keep my hands from being sticky. I used to go glove -free all the time, but I never, never marked queens in the past. So now that I'm marking every queen, I can just slip them gloves off, I can grab her, I can handle her. I'm not ripping her wings off because they've snipped to the propolis on my fingers or anything

like that. So, you know, I tell them, you don't have to be glove -less. And I get stung through those gloves. I haven't tried those. I'm going to give those a shot. I wear the nitrile gloves and you can get stung through those. Oh, yeah. But it is really nice when you're done working some hives to just pull those off and throw them away. Right. And yeah, you're not digging propolis

out of your fingers. I tried the nitrile gloves for a while, but my hands just get so wet and sweaty, you know, because when I go out to work bees, I'm going to a yard to go through 30, 40 hives. That's just a long time. And those other ones, they got, you know, they're the white material. They kind of absorb the moisture, the sweat. You still have the dexterity because they are so tight. Yeah, I love them. You're selling me

on all kinds of things today. You should have stock in Home Depot and in Poly Hives and all this stuff. I watch other beekeepers and they'll

put on those black nitrile gloves. And I'm like bees don't like black no no no that's one of the things about the Home Depot gloves that I Just don't really care for is and they've got some black lettering on the back of them And a lot of times the bees just target that black lettering a little bit But but nothing bad and the nitrile ones that I have they're just that light blue color It doesn't seem to agitate the

bees at all right. They are thin enough. You're gonna tear them now and then oh, yeah, you know And yeah, the sweat is definitely an issue. I tell the new beekeeper that'll make you a better beekeeper because with those big leather bulky gloves, you're crushing bees. Crushed bees make for mean bees. You want to alleviate that problem. So the moral of our discussion today is no big heavy leather gloves and no boxer shorts. Exactly. John, thank you for being with me. I appreciate

your time. All right. I'm glad we got to do it. Thanks again for joining us here on Be Love Beekeeping, presented by Man Lake. Remember right now to follow or subscribe and share this podcast. Also a quick shout out to Vita Bee Health for their support. Vita's Varroa Control range of products includes Apistan, Apigard, and now Varroxan Extended Release Oxalic Acid Strips. Thanks guys. And remember, if you're not just in it for the honey or the money, you're in it for the love. See you next week.