We believe that the double deep it the worst possible choice of Wintering configurations for the southeast

摘要

It is true that honey bees much prefer to rear brood on the larger expense of comb provided by deep frames. It's as close as they can get to the continuous comb of the wild brood nest in the tree hollow. But a choice of two deeps to prepare the Winter brood nest is one too many. They do not want the Winter brood nest spanning the gap in functional comb between the two deeps. So they have to decide, before brood nest closeout in the Fall, which to use. In my area the choice is about 50/50. Half the colonies choose the lower, and half elect to Winter in the upper hive body. Occasionally, a colony will straddle the decision fence and wind up going into Winter with a cluster two or three frames wide and two stories high. This produces an inefficient Winter cluster shape, but is probably better than selecting one or the other of the two hive bodies.