Beemaster's International Beekeeping Forum

BEEKEEPING LEARNING CENTER => EQUIPMENT USAGE, EXPERIMENTATION, HIVE PLANS, CONSTRUCTION TIPS AND TOOLS => Topic started by: David McLeod on July 21, 2011, 08:50:29 pm

Title: Hives of the world
Post by: David McLeod on July 21, 2011, 08:50:29 pm
Having just completed a couple warres I am now contemplating other designs just the heck of it. I've always liked the look of the WBC and the british national looks simple enough. Anyone else build other than langstroth boxes?
Title: Re: Hives of the world
Post by: gailmo on July 21, 2011, 10:26:45 pm
I returned yesterday from a six week teaching job in South Korea.  We visited a farm one afternoon and while poking around in the back fields, I ran into a group of bee hives.  I have a bunch of pictures and will try to post them...but I am mostly a "lurker" on this forum and haven't posted much....so I might not be able to upload photos. Unfortunately, no one spoke English and my Korean is pretty limited.  Also, I saw no one around the hives....so it was just me, a curious beekeeper, trying to figure out how they did things here.  But, it was very interesting and I was like a kid in a candy shop, poking around the hives and in the barn.

The hives had much, much smaller supers. They were about 1 ft by 1 ft in width and length.  The height of the super was about six inches and as far as I could tell, they were frameless. They had some type of tape sealing the supers together, so I imagine that the bees just starting filling the boxes with comb. 

(http://img39.imageshack.us/img39/8973/manyhives.jpg) (http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/39/manyhives.jpg/)

Uploaded with ImageShack.us (http://imageshack.us)

Each of the hives had either a paper or grass "hat" that was tied on--most likely to keep the rain out.  I didn't look closely, but I imagine that these "hats" probably were the only cover on the hive.

(http://img849.imageshack.us/img849/458/onehive.jpg) (http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/849/onehive.jpg/)

I think the honey was probably harvested by removing everything from the small boxes and then straining out the honey. I did find a large barn type of shed that was filled with lots of old and new boxes.  I didn't see any extraction gear around.  I did find some old used boxes which still had some comb on the sides....which further confirmed that they just cut out the comb and honey. 


(http://img804.imageshack.us/img804/9241/newboxes.jpg) (http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/804/newboxes.jpg/)

(http://img9.imageshack.us/img9/2143/moreboxes.jpg) (http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/9/moreboxes.jpg/)

Now my challenge is to check my poor unattended hives!  They have been untouched for six weeks....so I am hoping to get into them tomorrow morning to see what "the girls" have managed to do while I was away.

Title: Re: Hives of the world
Post by: BlueBee on July 22, 2011, 01:41:17 am
Very nice photos gailmo!  My first inkling when I saw those photos was you stumbled upon a colony of Jawa (hooded creatures from Star Wars)
Title: Re: Hives of the world
Post by: bee-nuts on July 22, 2011, 10:09:55 pm
I saw a video made in japan titles something like traditional honeybee hive.  It looked just like these.  They took a string or wire and ran it slowly between the boxes then took the box.  They obviously extracted by crush and strain but I think they might just sell the whole box as is, like cut comb maybe..

Here I found the video i think
http://youtu.be/IZldnd9wMLU (http://youtu.be/IZldnd9wMLU)