In the past, we were using some wooden MiniPlus for the production of queens during the season. The size was sufficient to overwinter some queens with a >75% success rate.
In 2012, we stopped using them for 2 reasons:

• we had to work with too many different sizes: 10-frame hives, 6-frame hives, Maxi+, Mini+ and Kielers,
• we found it hard to work with the Mini+ frames. We prefer to work with the honey chambers’ frames. Therefore, we sold our Mini+ and transformed our Maxi+ from a warm way (12 frames) into the cold way (6 frames).

starting up of the Mini+:

We fill up the Mini+ in April, during the colza blossoms, with package bees, or with the division of Mini+ and Maxi+ that overwintered.

Overwintering of the micro colonies:

We overwinter the colonies on 1 or 2 elements. In retrospect, we noticed that we had better results with overwintering on 1 element, providing that we followed correctly the reserves.

Behaviour of queens rearing in Mini-Plus on our bee farm

The different formats of hives used on our farm specializing in queen rearing and the swarms production