Equipment efficiency

[Beefriendly]

Next year I'm hoping to go for 15-20 hives and will need to prepare for that over winter with equipment...
!

If you are aiming for that amount of hives then your bottleneck will (hopefully) be extraction efficiency. Took me a while to sort that one out....Still not perfect but better than it was. Winter preps are easy in comparison.

 

[maz0]

Onnce you have extracted the supers, stacked them wet and cinched them up, you don't want to be faffing around opening and closing them, removing and replacing the frames - messy, sticky, will attract wasps, bees and waxmoth - you'll have a nasty shock when you need them again in the spring.
Thornes English feeders - fit nicely on top of the crownboard, no need for ekes if you have deep roofs, hosed down and stored away in minutes, a much more sensible and efficient idea.

This is the sort of knowledge I need, the day to day experience! I bet when your in that mess you wish you just forked out the money for the damn feeders.

 

[maz0]

If you use brood frames for honey, does your extractor work with frames of that size? Most don't.

What frame spacing will you use for your honey boxes? Have you standardized this yet? Reduce the number of frames and the weight goes up (a little) and your efficiency increases too.

I'm not so sure on the spacing side of things, so far I've only used the Hoffman frames which takes care of that for me, I think?

If you are aiming for that amount of hives then your bottleneck will (hopefully) be extraction efficiency. Took me a while to sort that one out....Still not perfect but better than it was. Winter preps are easy in comparison.

I treated myself this year to a decent extractor...if I'm hoping to expand the hives I didn't see the point in starting with a rubbish small thing so got a Lyson 20 frame which can do 8 full nationals or 20 shallows...I'm sure there are other parts of the processing you are referring to as well though like uncapping and separating wax/honey etc? I have no experience of them on a large scale yet so appreciate if you have any advice there!

 

[wightbees]

Feeders, I use 15ltr ex food buckets from a sandwich producer ( get them free) drill load holes in the middle of the lid... Job done, cost nothing

 

[jenkinsbrynmair]

This is the sort of knowledge I need, the day to day experience! I bet when your in that mess you wish you just forked out the money for the damn feeders.

If you go on to ebay - Thornes sell the feeders on there - discount and free postage on bulk purchase

 

[jenkinsbrynmair]

I'm not so sure on the spacing side of things, so far I've only used the Hoffman frames which takes care of that for me, I think?

Hoffman spacings are OK, many commercials just stick to that - saves faffing around with any spacers (castellations or those auful plastic ends) personally I prefer a little bit extra width so I use ten frame castellations. Go to any wider spacings (less frames) and it just becomes an awful faff, fiddling around with loads of heavy frames just makes the job more of a bind