To boil it down to one single point, a brood box is a box in a beehive that the bees use for raising their young.
That’s it.
Every other box in a beehive is for honey storage, but the brood box is where the bees raise the next generation of bees in the hive.
It’s simple, but it’s the key to understanding why a brood box is so important in beekeeping.
By having a separate space for brood rearing, the bees are free to move the honey and nectar that they’ve collected into the boxes above the brood box, while the queen is free to lay eggs and raise her young in the brood box.
If the queen was to lay eggs in honeycomb cells that were filled with honey, the larvae would drown in the honey. Honey is too viscous for a small larva to swim through.
The bees seem to know this themselves, which is why they always store honey and nectar above the brood box, and never in the brood box itself.
There’s one other big reason why a brood box is great for beekeeping, and it’s to do with how you inspect your hive.
If you’re inspecting your hive to see how things are going, you’ll be pulling out frames of comb to see if the queen is laying eggs properly, and to see if there are any diseases or pests in the hive.
Since the brood box is where the queen lays her eggs, and where the bees raise their young, you’ll find the answer to all of your questions about the health and productivity of your hive in the brood box.
If you had to pull out frames of honey every time you inspected your hive, it would be a disaster. The bees would get stressed, and it would take them days to repair the damage.
But with a brood box, you can inspect your hive to your heart’s content, and leave the bees to do what they do best: pollinate and collect honey.
If you’re looking to get into beekeeping, then a brood box is an absolute must if you want to keep things simple.
You’ll be able to enjoy constant access to your own, all-natural, raw honey, and you’ll be able to pollinate your garden with ease.
The best part?
With a good brood box design, you can expand your hive to whatever size you want by simply adding more boxes to the top.
What does that mean?
It means that there’s no limit to how much honey you can get from your hives.
If you’ve got enough land, you can have a truly self-sufficient backup of honey that you can rely on, no matter what else is happening.