A comparison of the Rose Hive Method with the performance of hives managed as traditional Nationals. We'll be writing a series of blogs to follow progress over the next 12 months.
Background
Having done our beekeeping to date like most British beekeepers (BKs) using National hives, this year we're experimenting with something different. Even before we knew about Rose hives, we had started to see the shortcomings of multiple box sizes and to wonder about the effectiveness of limiting the brood nest to a shape that is clearly not what the bees prefer. As a result we've decided to run some side-by-side comparisons of how the bees fare over the next year in Rose hives vs National hives, and we'll post our findings as we go along.
Single Size Boxes
As we're sure many BKs have before, we saw the obvious benefits of having one size of box, but realised that using all brood boxes would make the honey 'supers' really heavy, and using all supers would mean large numbers of boxes per hive, increased cost, loss of wax area, more frames to make etc.
It was at this point, 18 months or so ago, we came across Rose boxes (or One Size Boxes or OSB as they are sometimes known). The Rose boxes are the same footprint as a National, so you can use all of your existing stands, floors, crown boards and roofs, but are 190mm deep, which puts them more or less half way between a brood box (225mm) and a super (150mm); ideal!
Their inventor Tim Rowe has also written a book (The Rose Hive Method: Challenging Conventional Beekeeping, by Tim Rowe. Green Hat Books), so we bought that to find out more.
Likely Benefits of Single Size Boxes
Only need to keep one size of boxes and frames, so no chance of running out of brood boxes, or super frames etc. This should save us money and space.
Only need to take one size of everything when visiting out apiaries, so much easier.
Much easier to move frames between boxes, such as to replace old comb.
Easier to make splits to make increase.
There are no intrinsic disadvantages we can see to keeping bees in single size boxes, but there are some practical issues:
Disadvantages
Only available in the UK from Thornes, and only available assembled (although as they only comprise 4 parts, they are far cheaper than national boxes).
Made from lower quality timber, so must be painted.
Less convenient if obtaining bees from elsewhere (most likely on brood frames).
The Rose Hive Method
We won't attempt to detail all of Tim's ideas here, but will probably cover all of them over the course of the summer. However, the key thing is that he doesn't use queen excluders (QEs). We realise this isn't new, and there are plenty of BKs who use Nationals without QEs, but the single sized boxes seem to make this much more relevant and practical, for reasons that we'll attempt to validate. This encourages the bees to build their brood nest in whatever shape they wish, which from Thomas Seeley's descriptions of wild colonies, would seem to mean tall and thin. Tim suggests that the brood nest will expand upwards through the boxes until late June, then naturally contract back down later in the year, backfilling the space with honey, leaving 'supers' free of brood to extract.
The other key aspect initially is where new boxes are added depending on the time of year (of which more later).
The Plan
Because we see no intrinsic disadvantages to using a single size of box, we fully expect to form our new hives from Rose boxes as we expand, and to slowly replace our nationals as they age, but that's neither here nor there.
The real experiment will be to run a number of hives in accordance with all of Tim's method and compare them with our Nationals (on brood and a half with QEs) to see how they fare for:
Health
Expansion and maximum colony size
Honey production
Over wintering
Ease of management
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