Single brood box management is a system of beekeeping that is often used by commercial beekeepers with Langstroth hives, because it is a very efficient method of dealing with beehives. It’s also very simple.
It’s so simple, in fact, that you don’t even have to do any inspections, which is a lot easier for you and a lot less stressful for the bees.
Here’s what you do:
- Start off with a new hive with just one brood box.
- Let the bees build up the brood nest until it reaches the sides of the box.
- As soon as the brood nest reaches the sides of the box, add a box of foundation or drawn comb on top.
- You should put a queen excluder between the two boxes to stop the queen from going up, but allow the workers to pass through.
- Keep adding new boxes on top as soon as the bees have drawn out the comb in the previous box. You can keep doing this without limit.
- At the end of the season, remove the queen excluder and add a box of honey on top of the topmost brood box to let the bees fill it.
- In the spring, you can take the honey box out. It’s now your new bottom brood box. Add a new box of foundation or drawn comb on top of it, and put the old box with the queen excluder back on top. The bees will start building down from the top box and so you’ll still avoid the hassle of having to perform inspections.
- Repeat.
That’s it.
The reason why this system is so simple is because the bees are given the freedom to build as they please, and whenever they run out of space for brood, they’ll just start building some new comb above the existing brood nest.
The queen excluder stops the queen from going up, so that the bees don’t end up with a honey-filled brood nest. You could let the bees build new brood comb above the honey like they would in a top bar hive, but it’s a lot more efficient to have the brood nest in the very bottom box, which is why the queen excluder is used in this system.
Of course, you don’t have to use single brood box management if you don’t want to, but I think that it’s definitely worth giving it a try. It really is the most efficient way of managing a beehive, and it’s so much simpler than having to perform inspections.