Is this normally do-able, or unusual?

[pingping]

Can anyone here please give me some comparisons from their experience?

March - 5 colonies on 3 year old queens
4 on 1-3 seams, very weak
1 on 9 seams, good

In one season to have these do the following:
- average 140lb each
- re-queen all with colony-raised queens
- split each to give 10 colonies early July
- all splits and original colonies now at 15-24 seams full strength.

Other info: queen stock Ged Marshall; at 620 foot altitude, Buckinghamshire, no rape, mostly tree nectar, bean in July at 1 mile, 2.5 acres of immediate clover ley. Countryside, but not good bee country. Not moved to crops this year.

This is a serious question, not bragging. I have been using my type of hive for 5 years and this is perfectly normal for me, but I have no comparison trad beehive alongside and I need to some genuine feedback. Do others achieve this sort of result in conventional gear? How would it rank if you go this out of your apiary?

I am sure some can micro-manage this sort of result, but I have very low input. Inspect brood 4 times a year, they do not swarm (management trick) and use 50lb supers so a new box every other week or so. This 2020 season, above, was off the back of an experimental 2019 winter of no-feed and Ivy stores only (not recommended), so was poor. I have averaged 240lb in some years. Normally a split of a new queen in May or June will draw out 16 national brood frames, back- fill them and be ready to swarm again in 1 month. A June split will give 50lbs surplus good or bad year, excluding their stores.

So to me they seem pretty productive. If you can read the above and tell me if this is within your experience in generally available gear I will be able to gauge better what I have here, as a reference. And I am not selling them. This is research.

Many thanks.
Ted

[Patrick]

Sounds pretty good to me Ted.

Can’t be that bad bee forage area if they can bring in 240lb per colony. I have noticed some areas around me dominated by improved grassland simply don’t have the large areas of forage to do much more than bring in enough to maintain a colony. Or less.

[NigelP]

Sounds about right for Jed's queens given decent forage. They are of low swarming propensity and high honey gathering capacity.
I find forage/weather and strength of hive to be the driving factors for colony yields.
Yields for my area in North Yorkshire will be down this year due to a dreadful July and August both at home apiaries and those on the heather moors. The forage was there but if they cannot fly....
Following picture is of some amazing Canadian hives, they are multi queen hives, but show what it is possible to achieve.

[pingping]

Well, that's the reason for asking wider. There is a whole range of experience out there.

No, it isn't good ground and it is hard to get a 3 year old Q over 10 national frames of brood. Even a Jed Marshall. Local beekeepers up here get 10-20lb. The forage is not good at all. If I told you the biggest crop this year was holly, you would see what I mean. Whose bees bother with holly as a primary source? The 240lb was on better ground mind. They average 10 fold local beekeepers.

Nigel, I have run double queens in these hives with 30 frames of sold brood and 12 supers by end of May. I was in my second year of keeping and it was too much, like a child on Red Rum.

[Patrick]

So sounds like you are attributing your better yields to your particular hive type relative to conventional gear used by your neighbours, despite poor local forage but given good queens?

Is this a new design you have come up with?

[NigelP]

Sounds like you are using something akin to the "Rose Hive" with same sized boxes.
In my area local bees in the same apiaries as my Buckfast's would struggle to get 20-30lbs of honey per annum despite having access to the same forage as my Buckfast. I know I compared them side by side.
In one study I amalgamated 6 hives of locals into tow to give hives with comparable numbers of bees. On the spring rape flow (1 field away) the locals managed a super each and both decided to swarm, the equivalent Buckfast manged 4-5 each. and only 1 3 year old queen showed signs of swarming.
There is a study done in Canada that showed that hives with 2x as many bees would bring in 3x times the amount of honey than smaller colonies.
You can also genetically select for honey collection (it's inversely proportional to pollen gathering) which was aone the criteria Br. Adam used when breeding and selecting his Buckfast lines.

[pingping]

I have controlled for bloodlines, Nigel. In 2016, 2017 I had the full spectrum of wild swarms, mongrels, Jeds, Italians, and English black before replacing all with jeds to standardise.
I have found that foraging is dependent on bloodline but no difference between blacks, bucks or mongrels. The low outliers at about 80lb were the collected swarms. In these hives I have built the laying pattern of swarmy wild bees is very distinct even early in the season - even a good big queen from a wild swarm never lays corner to corner whereas a non swarmy strain will have 5-10 central frames pure brood and no stores. In other words, they never build the pop and are genetically inclined to reproduce early.

So in short, it isn't the bees. Also, local keepers are on a mix of bloodlines, including pure Bucks.

Which returns to the point: I know you are a very experienced keeper and have read everything on here for years. Bees and forage excluded and not micro managed, would the productivity this season outlined above be normally achievable or beyond expectations of a normal hive?

[AdamD]

Ted, Your yields look good but it is difficult to compare from one area to the next of course. I get several times the national average and my bees are better performing than any swarms I get. I do wonder whether I should buy a couple of Ged's (or other's queens) and see how they perform for me. If I get continual forage, my bees can do very well. Unfortunately I see a June Gap, a blackberry flurry in July and then another gap in August until ivy appears and the gaps knock the performance down considerably. In 2018, forage continued right through the summer and honey came in about double this year.

[NigelP]

, would the productivity this season outlined above be normally achievable or beyond expectations of a normal hive?

Define a normal hive.
As Adam says it is difficult to compare different areas and yields as so many variables.
If you are getting 140-up to 240lbs in a hive I'd suggest that they have plenty of forage and it's not a poor foraging area. With good Buckfast queens I'd say it was about average for them. As Adam mentions the drought year of 2018 was exceptional....in some areas. Those on chalk (Yorkshire Wolds for example) had very poor yields as the soil there does not retain water well.

[Patrick]

Averages really are the pigs arse of statistics and seen in isolation often hide as much as they usefully inform. As I remember it the BBKA survey suggests something around the 25lb to 35lb mark as a national average of members polled.

But the variables are many in that sample. Like Adam I average multiples of my reported regional average but I know that average includes plenty of people who struggle to manage swarming, which knackers your crop. I spent more than enough years being one of them