Hey everybody, I had a thought this morning and please give me your opinions.
If I had a strong two deep brood chamber, put in a bar of queen cups, bred say four queens. Then if I took two deeps, put vertical dividers and entrance in there and two frames from the second brood chamber with bees and brood, put them in each division and one frame of undrawn comb or old drawn foundation, put queen excluders on top of the first brood chamber, newspaper, a divided full depth with queen cup, another queen excluded on top and another divided full depth the same as the other would that be a good way of building up sufficient quantities of workers to start nucs? Or would the workers in the hive have a hissy fit working for five queens? Then when numbers were high enough, the queens were mated and laying, I'd take those three frames from each division and make up five frame nucs.
I think the queens would fight through the excluders if the workers did accept them, which is doubtful.
Here is a system that I am trying this year.
http://maarec.psu.edu/CCDPpt/TwoQueenSystemFeb2009.pdf (http://maarec.psu.edu/CCDPpt/TwoQueenSystemFeb2009.pdf)
Have fun.
you should be pulling suppers of honey daily from that kinda hive
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I have had tens of years 4 part mating boxes but it is worse than individual mating boxes.
There is no advantage about number of queens because number of workers commands how much brood the hive can produce.
If one queen is able to produce a hive which is up to hair level, where you need 2 queen hive?
There's a very good chance the virgin queens could slip through your queen excluders.