Today I took a couple trips to a commercial apiary located about 20 miles from our place. I went down in the afternoon to get some frames. (I don't have the time right now to cut my own, and they were only 50 cents each.) He showed me around his workshop, all the specialized woodworking equipment that will cut complete top bars, end bars, boxes, etc. from one pass of a piece of wood through the machine. He explained how he treats the boxes with copper compound, and even gave me a thin kerf blade to cut the wedges in the top bars I bought. Even though he has many of his hives farmed out all over the northeast, the air was literally buzzing with bees. We got to talking and I mentioned that someone I knew bought some single box hives from him earlier this year, and he said he still had a bunch.
So I went back this evening as it was getting dark and picked up two of them. We drove out through the cows to his hive holding areas. They were full of stacks of hives. There were several pallets of hives set off by themselves that belonged to someone in PA, that he'd recently brought back from Maine because the guy was overloaded. He said they were mean and didn't like them. We picked two of his hives that he said had been recently checked out as queenright. They were both bearding and heavy. He smoked them a bit and then just swung them up into the pickup onto our pallet. He breeds Minnesota Hygienic queens and has been running his hives with these for several years. I dunno how these will compare with the ordinary italians I've had up 'til now. He also said he's been trying to breed some SMR traits into them, but hasn't been successful yet.
So we drove the hives back and offloaded them into our beeyard. It was a little hairy because the one hive was bearded all up the front of the box. But they're all set now and I'll run through them and add another deep tomorrow.
All in all, it was a very enlightening day!
-- Kris
Topic: Trip to an apiary (Read 2473 times)