Indeed.
I trust you have no near neighbours
Dexterâs version of an artificial swarm involves making a nucleus colony with the queen. Nearly as messy as your Taranov.
A more common way of artificially swarming the colony is to replace the original box with an empty box minus a couple of frames and in that space place the queen on a frame of brood (no queen cells) and a frame of stores. Replace any supers. This now becomes your artificial swarm. The parent colony get moved a few feet away and raises a new queen. Provided you attend to a couple of necessary manoeuvres afterwards this method as almost foolproof and involves no catching of queen or throwing of thousands of bees.
There is even a way of doing it without initially finding the queen at all.
I like the look of the insulation those hives. Would these be compatible with the flow frames? Obviously you wouldnât be cutting out for the drains so you would have to remove the frames to drain them. I was looking at building something similar out of lumber but would still like to use the flow frames âin placeâ design to its fullest and I havenât figured a way around that in a horizontal hive yet.
As I mentioned, there are a variety of methods to split â here, here, & here â and many many more opinions. The Taranov board easily separates the ready-to-swarm bees from those who will remain in the original hive. Although I currently have a marked queen, it will probably be my only, so a system that doesnât rely on my limited queen-finding skill (and the hard-to-spot Carniolan queen) is attractive. It doesnât require any rearrangment of the brood frames beyound the shaking out, which fits with my wish to maintain the integrity of the nest as much as possible.
If you are handy with woodâŚI believe it is easy to make a long hiveâŚif you made a Langstroth one then you could just put your Flow frames in a super above the long hive. I am going to try to make a Langstroth poly long hive. I am waiting for the sales to start in the hope of picking up the polys. Then I will cut out the side walls and fix the brood boxes together. When my Flow hive arrivesâŚI will be able to put the Flow super on aboveâŚnext year. I expect I will need a helper to move the super aside for inspections as it will hopefully be full of honey!! Unlike this year which has been really poor for honey.
Iâm in a cane toad area, I keep my hives two besser blocks off the ground. You need to position your hive (assuming you donât have any pests to worry about) so that you can work your bees comfortably. You donât want to be bending over or kneeling. You bee suit is most effective when your standing up straight.
