Should I Run Deep Or Medium Frame Colonies?
This is really a matter of personal preference; however, unless someone has physical limitations, we normally encourage "deeps". There are a number of reasons that we encourage this, including:
- We have found personally that most of our bees seem to do best on deep brood frames. For whatever reason, in our own personal experience, those hives seem to take-off and thrive better than those on mediums.
- As noted above, it is actually more work and harder for us to produce medium nucs that we are happy with. As such, we produce far more deep nucs than we do mediums.
- We are able to provide black foundation for our deep frames. This greatly enhances the ability to see eggs and developing larvae on the frames.
- Even with a good medium nuc, just based on sheer volume and area, people buying medium nucs are really only getting about 2/3 the bees, brood, and food in the medium nucs as they get in the deep nucs; however, our costs and efforts in producing are just the same (if not more).
- Long-term, it takes 3 medium brood boxes to equal the same brood area as 2 deep boxes. This equals more cost in boxes and frames. It also means more boxes and frames to check through when looking for the queen or doing other hive inspections.
- People can still stack medium honey supers on top of their deep brood boxes to minimize the weight associated with handling honey supers.
- Long-term, there are ways to convert your bees over to medium brood frames from deeps should your situation change or should you so desire to do so in the future.