No, they don’t backfill the brood area as long as you keep empty supers on top during the nectar flow. The fracturing of the stores above the brood nest and unrestricted brood space are the key elements of this method. But it is not foolproof, if they run out of space in the supers they will then ultimately backfill brood areas and the swarm impulse will return.

@@lowinterventionbeekeeping5408 so does this principal work with a single brood then queen excluder then keep on top of your supers with the top super always empty and checkerboarded or must you let the brood area grow or it will still swarm

@@TH-cl5be the minimum is double brood with the upper box being capped stores. You checkerboard the top box of stores with empty comb and remove the queen excluder. The brood will chimney through the three boxes and if the queen is prolific also lay brood in the fourth once added. Any restriction on the brood nest or failing to add space to the top of the colony will potentially lead to the swarm impulse returning. Apart from disease checks there are no inspections required.

@@lowinterventionbeekeeping5408 ok thanks, i thought there might of been a chance i could still run single brood box only then just cherckerboard supers keeping ahead of the bees and not have them swarm.

The method allows the colony to extend the brood area to the extent that they need, which in my experience is 3-4 deep boxes but this depends on the queen/forage etc. It is the unrestrained brood area and fracturing of the stores during the early spring that prevents the swarm impulse from materialising. In July (UK) the brood area reduces and they backfill with stores. Plus the bottom box is used for pollen and only a limited amount of brood. It is quite different to running a colony with a queen excluder.

Thanks Carol. Pleased to hear you have happy bees and your excellent beekeeping observations have intuitively led you to a low impact solution. Less swarming also means a happy beekeeper. All the best.

Thanks, yes you can use boxes fed with syrup as they will convert that into brood. From our own observations, the use of drawn comb gives reliable results. Using foundation might be OK initially early in the season, but as soon as the colonies gain momentum they need a lot of nectar storage space and I jut don’t think they can draw the comb quickly enough whilst preventing the backfilling of brood areas. I would suggest building up an inventory of drawn comb as if a checkerboarded colony swarmed……it is going to be a huge swarm.

A good question, but swarming for beekeepers can cause a real nuisance to neighbours so it is not something we rely on for managing varroa. John, Anita and Gill are treatment free and have been for a number of years. There are a number of options for managing varroa and achieving treatment free status, but in reality this can take years to achieve so won’t suit the average beekeeper. I am hoping to persuade John to do a series of videos next year on the steps to being treatment free.

Hi, what wasn’t shown in the video was that none of the supers had been capped and all this expansion happened over a very short time in the best flow local beekeepers can remember. A week later, I did another video and removed several supers onto other colonies. Removing bees from frames with unripe honey is a messy business…but despite the very strong nectar flow the bees did not swarm which is what makes Walt Wright’s observations and method so impressive

We have only implemented this on a standard vertical hive. It might be worth trying this approach though in a long hive and see if it works.

Hi, it’s the bees that seem to leave it empty of brood and use it to store loads of pollen. Walt Wright referred to it as the pollen box and used it as part of the checkerboarding manipulation. Once I remove honey I will be placing the queen in the bottom box to restrict her laying to one brood body and have another brood body which will be filled completely with capped stores for winter.

Thanks, lots of beekeepers have said that and it is normally something I would do 😁. What I didn’t show in the video was the amount of unripe honey in the colony, and it was the same across the whole apiary. Sometimes when all the hives are at full stretch with so much nectar coming in the options are more limited. We have had one of the best beekeeping seasons in memory in the SE UK. I left it a week as the nectar flow was coming to an end and did another video kzbin.info/www/bejne/fmi9nYagfLaSkNU where I distributed some boxes onto other hives.

Oops, sorry. I opened my mouth before I knew all that you were dealing with. My apology. So impressive, you are lucky to have such busylittle bees and such healthy hives 🐝🐝👍👍

That’s the next video 😁 kzbin.info/www/bejne/fmi9nYagfLaSkNU

If they run out of space at the top they will have to store nectar somewhere and the only place will be the brood nest. This means all the bees in one place. Too many bees, no space to groom each other/spread queen pheromone and the swarm impulse starts. This method keeps them working by having an unrestricted brood nest, always somewhere to store nectar and prevents the swarm impulse from being realised. If the queen starts to fail, they supersede rather than swarm.

@@lowinterventionbeekeeping5408 I agree with you 100%. The point I was trying to make is that we've always been taught that the back-filling a brood nest leads to swarming. You were the first person I've heard say that they start back-filling in preparation TO swarm. Just something I hadn't heard before... and seems a bit of which came first... back-filling or desire to swarm. Granted, if we manage space correctly, as with checkerboarding, swarming is less of an issue. Dick Brickner here in the US is a big proponent of the checkerboarding as well. I had planned to try it this year but we had a poor nectar flow. Maybe next year!

@@matthewb7800 it is absolutely worth trying even on just one colony,. It is scary at first not looking in the brood every week, but having done it this year in what has been a very swarmy season in the UK I am convinced on the merits of this approach. Mainly due to the simplicity of the method v spending a lot of time each week judging the brood nest under an excluder or moving stores/brood around.

Hi, the method used here is checkerboarding and it is a swarm control method. The restriction of the brood nest with a queen excluder can be a trigger for swarming in a lot of colonies. The queen will lay everything up to their limit and then at the end of the season the brood will retreat down to the overwintering configuration. The benefit of this is a higher honey yield, no need for brood inspections (this video was just to demonstrate the rapidly expanding brood nest) and no swarming. These benefits throughout the season outweigh the end of nectar flow sorting of brood and honey stores at the honey divide to allow extraction of honey. But it won’t suit everyone due to the size of the colonies at the end of the year.

Correct, the checkerboarding theory is in this video kzbin.info/www/bejne/ipvNqHqjicSXmbs

@@lowinterventionbeekeeping5408 great hank you something im thinking of doing im in lincolcnshire and strugglin for decent harvests thinking this may help do you find bigger crops with this aswell

@@spike2111982 there is a big unrestricted brood nest, it was the equivalent of 4 deep nationals in my hives this year. So when it is good like this year then they fill more than one super in a week. When it is bad, like last May (2021) they go through a lot of stores. But overall, there is mostly a lot more honey than from my standard hives. You need a lot of drawn comb as the colonies really move fast; so not something to try if you are reliant on foundation for extra space.

@@lowinterventionbeekeeping5408 thank you ill bear that in mind

Hi Bob, thanks, I have had a few comments on this but the size of the hive got people's attention and made them want to watch the video. I generally remove surplus in spring and leave the honey reserve in place for our dearth between spring and summer. Then just try and keep up in the summer; the main nectar flow this year was as good as anyone can remember locally, and the hive grew very quickly. What I didn't show in the video was how many of the supers were not complete when I did this inspection. I did another video a week or so later and reduce its height as I anticipated a lot of the stores would be capped or almost complete kzbin.info/www/bejne/fmi9nYagfLaSkNU. If we don't think we have enough drawn comb for the entire season we will checkerboard boxes of drawn comb with some foundation so there is nectar storage capacity immediately. We haven't had consistent results with adding boxes with just foundation, it may be a peculiarity of the nature of our nectar flows but we have had colonies ignore foundation completely, bypass it if there is drawn comb above or even worse start backfilling the brood nest.

@@lowinterventionbeekeeping5408 Thanks for the feedback.

I was expecting this comment as I should have explained this in the video. The previous videos showed us going through brood frames and I had quite a lot of people saying they wouldn't do checkerboarding for the sole reason that they don't have the time to go through so much brood in each hive. So we inadvertently confused a lot of people into thinking we have to inspect every frame. The inspections for checkerboarding are very quick and do not follow the traditional brood inspections that I would do on other hives. It is all about ensuring that there is always 2 supers or more above the top of the stores to ensure the bees always have an excess of space to store nectar. So I purposely didn't show any brood, it was just a case of assessing available space in stores above the brood and adding more space if required. So for beekeeping purposes, a boring video as we all like to see brood and the queen; but hopefully makes the point that this is what we do during the season on checkerboarded colonies. The method prevents swarms, the inspections are very quick but as you can see you need a lot of drawn comb to keep up. This is due to the size of the brood nest and correlating high numbers of foraging bees that will fill several supers in a week during a strong flow.

Hi Grant, we just uploaded another video which is a bit more detailed: kzbin.info/www/bejne/fmi9nYagfLaSkNU

I know John has done in the past but we always put drone foundation towards each side of the brood nest to ensure that there are plenty of drones available for when these colonies supersede. It also helps with colony temperament. At the end of the season the bees change their use to stores.

Hi, yes John has been having over 140lbs from checkerboarded hives so that was a good guess. I think this year will be higher as the weather has been perfect all year

We had 5 feet of snow in March and 2 feet in January, all the trees and flowers are trying to bloom again. My Rhododendron are about to bloom again. I don’t harvest the honey yet but I’ll have lots of honey for patties and water for feeding. Cheers

@@TheSoilandGreen last year was awful in the UK for us until June, so we only had the last few weeks in July for a honey crop. This year we have had a spring crop and it is looking like a huge summer crop. But from talking to the association it has correlated with a record number of swarms. This is why we are so impressed with Walt Wright’s checkerboarding method. No swarms, just challenges over how high the hives can go…

Hi Rob, here is a link to the first manipulation which we did in December(!) - kzbin.info/www/bejne/o6bJh4loq55kpM0. We are located in the SE of UK where our winters tend to be mild; certainly a lot warmer than Canada during the winter months. In the first year when John White was trialling this method, he did the first manipulation in February and had one colony swarm, then decided to try December on a day with temperatures >10C as January and February is when we have the most days of frost. This is a UK specific approach so it is a case of working out the earliest you can do this manipulation. Regarding supersedure, the cells have been observed in lower boxes as well as the upper boxes, the brood nest for the colonies we have manage normally extend across 4 deep brood boxes (or 2 deep and 4 shallow boxes). This video was a normal inspection just to show the extent of the brood area, a normal inspection is to the top of the brood to ensure sufficient space for nectar storage as the principle here is nectar management rather than brood management as you would do with a queen excluder in place. I have had two failed attempts to record inspections in May and June due to a loose connection on audio equipment and an overexcited small child operating the camera, so there should be another video in the next week of a checkerboarded inspection during a nectar flow to show you how quick it is.

Hi Rob, Walt Wright published a lot of his work on Beesource here: www.beesource.com/threads/walt-wright.365657/ There are some additional more recent documents from other beekeepers with some refinements on the approach but the principles of Walt's approach remain the same.

@@lowinterventionbeekeeping5408 Many thanks. I had seen some of this, but not all, and will read it all over.

Hi, we use this expression in the UK when we see a queen cup that has a larvae with royal jelly. Not sure on the origin of the term; but we say it to differentiate between queen cups that have larvae and will become a queen cell, and those that are empty (these are known as play cups....).

Hi, we don't have hive beetle in the UK so I cannot comment. However, we have not noticed any difference in absconding or mortality rate from this method compared to historic colony data, albeit this is not something I can say with statistical significance due to the relatively low numbers I have monitored. We freeze the frames taken off the hive after the honey crop and store with correx sheets between boxes in the winter to prevent reinfestation. We don't go into boxes until late March so I cannot comment if wax moth proliferates during the winter on the periphery of the hive, but I can say based upon the size of the colony I would not want to be a wax moth in there in April. Regarding varroa, it really is colony specific, and I personally haven't noticed a huge difference in mite counts as a % of brood. Most of the hives checkerboarded by our group are treatment free, and those that aren't are in the process of becoming treatment free. The size of the colony is huge, the brood nest is the equivalent of four deep national brood bodies in the late Spring, so honey crops of 100lbs+ are quite normal. But if the weather and nectar flow is poor, then the huge brood nest will consume a lot of stores quickly so it can result in a poor yield as well, but on the whole it is a better honey crop than a standard hive with queen excluder. If you want to use this method for generating brood for splits then it is great due to the huge unconstrained brood nest. I have used this myself to create a lot of nucs in June ready for overwintering. I don't know if this method has been used in horizontal hives so I cannot comment, but you have me thinking about trying it 🙂

Hi Matthew, they are old play cups rather than charged queen cells. They are very common in big colonies. None of the hives we checkerboarded have swarmed despite an amazing spring. We will need to extract the spring honey imminently as the hives are getting far too tall. We would look to do more regular updates but it takes time to shoot and edit. We will update in a couple of weeks when we look to remove the spring honey so you can see the size of the brood nest and numbers of super that have been filled prior to the main flow.

I would say yes as the time for inspections is minimal. Yields are higher but the issues for commercial beekeepers is that it takes longer to remove supers as there can be brood and honey in the same box. That is the feature I think put commercial beekeepers off the checkerboarding approach.

Hi Td. It would be worth watching this video (kzbin.info/www/bejne/ipvNqHqjicSXmbs). This explains the checkerboarding methodology as for sure the comments you made are quite normal when people first see a checkerboarded hive with no restriction on the brood area. The checkerboarding approach produces an unrestricted, and therefore much larger brood nest than those colonies with queen excluders so thermoregulation of the colony is far easier and there is a significantly increased size of the field bee population to continually increase the brood size to the limit of what the queen can lay, and therefore honey production throughout the season. Regarding the drones, some colonies do appear to produce a lot more drones than others; what you see in the video is probably unusual for the average beekeeper but not that uncommon in checkerboarded hives.

Sorry, I missed this comment. The method was developed in the US where winters are far colder. We do the manipulation in the UK in December to end Jan and despite all the comments about the increase in space we add to the colonies and the detrimental impact over the ability of the colony to control thermoregulation it just doesn't seem to affect the bees that much in reality. We need two empty supers on the top at all times as a checkerboarded colony progresses very quickly and we frequently see two supers being filled with brood/honey in a week or so. The brood nest so far this spring has typically comprised of two deep brood bodies and three shallow brood bodies so you can imagine how much brood is hatching each day the present.

@@lowinterventionbeekeeping5408 I understand what you're saying however, doesn't that make your job really hard checking five or six boxes for your queen, or checking five or six boxes every few weeks for Queen cells cuz you don't want your ease to fly off. I'm not arguing with you just curious. I use two deeps and I admit bees would probably be bigger is had a shallow as well. But 5 seam way to much for a queen to run around laying. Just my opinion

@@td4190 Hi, I agree, inspections on those colonies at their peak would take ages and probably cause more harm than good. If you look at the playlist for the channel there is a presentation by John White explaining the method. We only did inspections for KZbin to show how a colony expands. But apart from a disease inspection in spring, we don’t do any brood inspections during the season. We just manage nectar by adding space to make sure we are always two supers ahead of the bees. They supersede frequently and so inspections can break supersedure cells that are stitched between frames/boxes. We only check into the brood area if they stop expanding but this is only ever down to a queen issue or disease. Since starting that I spend a lot less time checking the bees and I get more honey. But it is not a method for the faint hearted, as these are very big colonies to manage.

I am sure John will be doing some treatment free stuff later this year as that is more of a long term approach for managing bees. The checkerboarding method has clear advantages in the short term for swarm control and honey yields, so we are focusing on that currently with swarming already happening in the UK (thankfully, not something happening in our apiaries…)

@@lowinterventionbeekeeping5408 thanks I'll be looking forward to seeing the videos.

It is far higher risk with foundation. We have known people checkerboard with foundation and the bees draw it ready for the flow and it works. But if a colony is prolific and generates a large population of foragers, coupled with is a strong nectar flow then the chances of the bees running out of storage and drying space increases - potentially resulting in backfilling and queen cells. So in all honesty: the results with drawn comb are reliable, but variable with foundation. With foundation, it is a race to draw comb before the incombing nectar overwhelms the capacity of the colony to process it outside of the brood nest. We are about to publish some videos of the first full inspections to provide an insight into how a checkerboarded colony builds up in the spring, and it is always amazing how quickly they can fill 3 deep brood bodies with wall to wall brood by mid April...... Most of us (that are first time checkerboarders) run colonies without queen excluders to generate huge amounts of brood comb ready for checkerboarding the following year.

@@lowinterventionbeekeeping5408 thank you very much for your response. I look forward to watching the next video you publish! 🙏

I think that is the main fear that will prevent beekeepers from attempting this. The method was developed in a region with far colder winters than the UK so we assumed that the bees were able to adapt to the early change in hive configuration. My own observations in cold weather and through a perspex quilt is that the cluster chimneys into a more elongated shape rather than a flat topped rugby ball shape (I hope that makes sense). I had a very quick check of the colonies on Wednesday and both checkerboarded colonies had brood over 2 national deeps with the bottom brood body being empty. They have similar amounts of brood to my colonies that were overwintered in a double brood body that I did not checkerboard. We plan to record our first 'proper' inspections of the checkerboarded colonies in early April to give you a sense of the difference between a checkerboarded and non-checkerboarded colony.

​@@lowinterventionbeekeeping5408 Walt's initial testing was done in north Alabama / Southern middle Tennessee USA. We have very mild winters here.

@@bobfanning6816 Correct, sorry I was responding on my phone. I should have said that the method is implemented in far colder regions than the UK. We regularly talk to beekeeping groups in the US as far north as New Jersey that implement checkerboarding.