Incatatus
New Bee
- Joined
- Jan 3, 2010
- Messages
- 62
- Reaction score
- 0
- Location
- Bridgend, S. Wales
- Hive Type
- National
- Number of Hives
- 2
wow, very impressive. i am green with envy, will your honey sales pay for all the work etc?
wow, very impressive. i am green with envy, will your honey sales pay for all the work etc?
CB, you use the Api Melter as a warming cabbinet too?
JD
nice to see someone else working hard !!
OSR extracting I presume ?
regards
S
Well resurected!!
Well the units have been working fantastically and have not been too small so far. A bit of box juggling required at peak times, this was re-solved by having smaller out apiaries of about 15 hives at each site (not 20+) so I took all the boxes from one site, extracted them and took them to the next site to replace the soon to be removed boxes and repeat around all the sites and return to the first site last (if that makes sense) more than 15 strong hives meant i would get a log jam of supers in the shed.
However we have taken the plunge and have bought a smallholding, with some serious out-buildings (old dairy farm) so have the opportunity to upgrade again, not sure how i'm going to do it or when (I might just bring the existing units over and plug them in for the time being).
Since I made the units exactly how I wanted them the extracting process became so efficient I could do it solo, so never had the handy assistant armed with a camera to help take photos of the setup in action, but i think i put about 2.5 ton through it this year relativley easily so might patent the design and sell prefab bee units,
I would finish work (easy work in the office) get home at 6pm load up with the empty boxes from the night before, go to a site take off the fresh boxes, return to the units as it got dark and then extract. During the OSR season this year, it felt like a never ending job as the rape kept flowering for such a long period I think I extracted something stupid like 18 days in May and June which should have been a 6-7 day job but they kept refilling the combs so i had to keep emptying them!
I did have to do some work to make them completely bee proof as last year i had a day when they discovered the shed and a good way in. Luckily the farmer who owwns the yard was very understanding but the scene was similar to the killer bee movie with bee's EVERYWHERE (main apiary is on the same farm with about 40 hives in it) when we opened the shed the walls were covered 2 bees deep all over. We opened it all up then waited until dusk, then armed with a leaf blower blew them all out and plugged up the holes they had found. This year we had no bee infestations however we did have a week were alot of wasps found their way in, still don't know why the bees didn't follow them in (they had eaten through some expanding foam). But the ensuing wasp frenzy enabled me and the farmer to watch where they were flying home to and mark and destroy most of the nests in the area.
Happy New Year everyone.
C B
Edit to add:
Never got round to finishing painting them properly or putting an extra roof on them (working at night meant it was never too hot inside).
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