One Box, Full Supers: The Practical Guide to Single Brood Beekeeping (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798258721426)

Are you losing too many hives over winter? Pulling less honey than you think your bees are capable of? Working harder than you should be?

One Box, Full Supers makes the case for a simpler, more productive approach to beekeeping: single brood management. Instead of the conventional double brood box setup, you keep your colony in one deep brood box and let the bees do what they do naturally. The results, in the right hands, are dramatic.

Author Thomas DeGan and his partner started beekeeping in Northern Virginia with two hives and lost everything their first winter. Over the next four years of conventional double brood management, they battled winter losses of thirty to fifty percent annually and pulled roughly one gallon of honey per colony per season. After attending an Eastern Apicultural Society conference and discovering single brood management, they transitioned their fifteen hives and never looked back.

The results over two seasons:

• Honey production: from 1 gallon per colony to 3 gallons per colony
• Winter survival: from 50% losses to zero losses across all fifteen hives
• Varroa treatments: reduced from multiple times per season to once

This is not a beginner's guide to beekeeping from scratch. It is a practical, evidence-backed guide to a specific method that works, written by two hobbyist beekeepers who measured everything and want to share what they found.

Inside you will find:

• The biological case for why a compact brood nest produces better bees and more honey
• Seasonal management guidance from late winter through autumn
• Swarm prevention strategies specific to single brood colonies
• How to transition from a double brood setup without starting over
• Honest discussion of when this method is and is not the right fit
• A full Quick Reference Guide for use in the field

One Box, Full Supers is written for hobbyist and small-scale beekeepers managing one to twenty hives who are ready to work smarter, lose fewer colonies, and finally fill those supers.