If I did as you suggested. It would be lucky if I got 40 to 60 pounds of honey per hive. I really do not want to grow bees anymore.
Good luck with that theory Jim. You have to grow bees to make honey no way around it.
There are many beekeepers that use QE's and limit the size of the brood nest to one deep. Then there are those that don't use a QE and the brood nest grows to 2 or 3 deeps. They both make about the same amount of honey. Logic says that if you let the hive grow to two deeps and split it in half it will make more honey than not splitting it. Obviously a mated queen has to be introduced.
Hi Brian.
What you appear to be saying is that if you take a hive of 2x-strength, and divide it into 2 hives each of 1x-strength, then - after supplying the obligatory queen - by working independently of each other their combined honey yield will be greater than that of the '2x hive'. Hope I've got that right.
I'm not a honey-farmer, and restrict myself only to 'growing bees' and raising queens. One system currently on trial here has 3 queens in one box - that's one 'mother' queen with 2 of her daughters separated behind mesh partitions. If this trial is successful, then that system will be maxed-out to 5 queens per box (one mother with 4 daughters similarly housed).
Because of this large number of laying queens (even for a relatively short time), an abnormally large concentration of various queen pheromones will exist within the box, and so I've been researching the possible consequences of this.
The only information I've gathered so far has been related to 2-queen systems - meaning
'2-queen honey production systems' in which, by the taking of two 1x-strength hives, and putting them close together with a single stack of supers over,
common to both hives - the honey yield has then vastly increased, well in excess of '2x'. In several articles, the increase in the amount of honey returned by effectively doubling the brood strength was dramatic - several hundred pounds per 'twin-hive', contrasted with seventy or eighty per individual hive. Thus
it would appear that there is an exponential correlation between brood box strength and honey-gathering potential.The only down-side to this mode of operation appears to be that it's something of a hassle to set-up and run, and as such doesn't lend itself well to migratory operation.
LJ