How Many Hives Should I Start With?
Start with at least two hives – This isn’t because we want to sell you more bees (we have no problem selling out of bees each year), but rather because we learned the hard way. Some of the advantages to having two or more hives are:
- You’ll learn more about your bees by having something to compare to. Let’s face it. (Especially if you are a new beekeeper) If you have just one hive, and it’s alive, you will probably think it’s doing well. However, you might not realize that they aren’t storing enough food, the queen does not have a good pattern, they aren’t building up fast enough, they are overly-aggressive, they are thinking of swarming, etc. If you have at least one other hive to compare to, you at least have some comparison basis.
- You can use your strong hive to balance out your weak hive and give them a better chance for survival (and possibly avert the strong hive from swarming). This could be in terms of moving extra frames of food, brood, worker bees (don’t accidentally move the queen!!), swapping the locations of the two hives, etc. to help balance out the hives and give the weaker one that extra kick-start that’s needed.
- You can often head-off an otherwise doomed hive. If you have just one hive, and they go hopelessly queenless (e.g.: did not produce a replacement queen or the replacement queen did not return from her mating flight), and you are unable to locate and buy a replacement queen at the time, you will probably end up watching that hive dwindle and eventually die-out. However, if you have another hive and can transfer a frame with fresh eggs on it over to the queenless hive, they will generally create a new replacement queen, assuming it’s the proper time of the year and there are enough drones in the area, thus saving that hive from doom.