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.
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ImageShack.usEach 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.
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.
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.