Our Head Beekeeper, Anne Frey, always recommends that new beekeepers begin by keeping more than one hive of bees. Despite the higher upfront cost of buying two colonies (and the hives for them to live in) there are many reasons to heed her advice and keep more than one colony. These include knowledge about how your bees are doing, as well as practical benefits by providing you "spare" resources from one colony that you can use to help another.
A very full Betterbee apiary!
In our beginning bee courses, the online or in-person offerings of our Core Bee Course, Anne often tells students the following story:
When I started I had one hive for a few years, and after visiting a beekeeper I met in my club, I saw every one of his hives was way stronger than my hive. To me this was amazing and I thought he was doing something special. But he said all these hives are just normal strength hives. That was when I realized that mine was under strength, and always had been.
Having more than one hive allows beekeepers to quickly identify when something may not be going right. A five-frame nucleus colony should be filling ten frames a few months into the summer. If yours isn't hitting its growth targets, how will you tell? With another colony next door, you will immediately notice the sluggish growth of a struggling colony, and know that you should ask for help from a more experienced beekeeper. Even better than two colonies is three or four. The more comparisons you can make within your apiary, the easier it is to pick out the colonies that are performing above or below average relative to the rest.
Comparing colonies for clues on their status
In the beginner class, Anne continues her tale of comparing hives:
Some years later, I walked up to a row of colonies and they all had a couple of shades of yellow pollen being brought in on the workers' hind legs. "Pollen pants," how cool! But at one hive entrance, nobody was carrying in pollen. I inspected that colony and saw no open worker brood (who need to be fed pollen), but lots of capped worker and drone brood. I also saw no eggs, and I saw capped swarm cells. In this case I let the bees raise those queen cells to maturity, so I didn't actually do anything different because of my observation that no pollen was being brought in. But it was a very interesting learning experience that was only possible by comparing colonies to each other.
By having multiple colonies in a row, the one having trouble stood out like a sore thumb. In this case, Anne discovered that one colony had swarmed, and was working on creating a new queen. If that was the only colony Anne was looking at, the absence of pollen could have just meant that no flowers were blooming in the area at that time. Only by comparison could she guess that the colony may be going through something interesting. In other cases, you might notice that one colony has half as much entrance traffic as the others, and then discover that they're struggling with disease, pesticide poisoning, or some other issue that has weakened them.
If the colony had failed to requeen themselves (for example, if the new queen had been eaten by a bird on her mating flight) the colony would be doomed. They would become "hopelessly queenless." But with another hive next door, a clever beekeeper can move a frame of brood and eggs from the healthy colony and insert it into the queenless colony, and they could make a new queen for themselves from the donated brood. A dying colony has now been saved by having a next-door neighbor!
(Of course, asking a struggling colony to raise a brand new queen after their prior attempt to raise a queen has already failed may leave them without a laying queen (and therefore new workers) for far too long. Therefore, a better option is usually to buy a new mated queen, and install her into the queenless colony alongside the frame of donated brood from the neighboring colony.)
More ways to help colonies help each other
Anne's advice concludes with one more story:
I was mentoring somebody years after that. It was her first spring of beekeeping and she had two hives. They were started from five-frame nucs from two different sources. She noticed during the first few weeks that there were fewer bees in one of the two colonies. We equalized the colony strength by moving a frame with quite a bit of capped worker brood on it from the strong one to the weak one. And we also swapped the positions of the two hives in the middle of the day. This was during May, and lots of nectar was being brought in by field bees, so lots of foragers were flying and there was not much likelihood of fighting at the entrances as "foreign" bees returned with loads of food. Trading the locations of the two hives gained the weak one a lot of field bees. Giving them a frame of capped worker brood soon provided them with a lot of emerging young nurse bees. The two colonies remained roughly the same size and strength throughout the summer.
A group of Beekeepers here at Betterbee working to examine a hive together.
Again, by having other hives of bees nearby, the beekeeper was able to cheaply and easily help a struggling colony and turn them back into a strong colony. Donating resources from one colony to another doesn't need to be as complicated as brood transplants or hive movements. Frames of honey and pollen from strong colonies can have their bees shaken off, and the frames of food resources can be popped into a struggling hive to help support them.
Housing options for bees
A final benefit of keeping multiple colonies is that the beekeeper can try different kinds of hive equipment, like wooden and polystyrene boxes, or 8 frame and 10 frame hive sizes. By keeping multiple hives, a beekeeper can learn which kinds of equipment they (and their bees) prefer.
What if I can't keep two hives?
Of course, sometimes you just can't get more than one hive. What do you do then?
Learn from Anne's story at the top of this article: If you can't keep a second (or third, or fourth) colony, you can take advantage of the other beekeepers in your local bee club. If you only have one colony (or even if you have more than one) try to visit other beekeepers as often as you can and look into their hives with them. You'll learn so much from them, and they'll probably learn from you. Not to mention what you can learn by seeing a few additional hives of bees.
