Thanks Dallasbeek and herbhome.
With your hive count, you are an advanced beekeeper.
I'm really not that advanced, but thanks. I have a fairly low-tech approach and don't make a ton of honey, enough for the family and some friends. Crush and strain. I make lots of bees though.
Reading your posts from 2014 leads me to ask: are all your bees from swarms or have you bought any bees? I'd like to see more about your TBH swarm trap design. Looks interesting from the description you wrote in 2014.
90% of my bees were propagated from swarms. That first swarm I caught, the Italians (2014) were failing come late September/October, so I requeened with a BWeaver queen. They wintered and got some daughters off of her. The other two swarms I caught that year, I'm guessing feral, make up the majority of what I propagated from for the rest. I lucked in to some good bees in regard to survivability. Added a couple of more local swarms from bait hive captures in 2015, ended up giving some away to friends to keep the population down in my apiary.
I got a Sam Comfort queen this year to see if I can add a little extra to the mix, raised a daughter late in the year. Very productive bees. Next year will see how they do on the resistance side of the equation, but I feel good about it. I'm in my infancy on learning the basics of queen rearing as I've always used splits/swarm cells to increase before. Looking forward to learning more in that regard, as well as trying to get some packages ready to sell this year to help out funding my little apiary and again keeping the population down. Looking for a good outyard. I have a couple of options, but would prefer something closer and don't want to lose whatever mojo is working for me locally.
The TBH traps I used that first year were pretty basic. They were scaled down to a 2' version of the larger hive I put them in, made of scrap 3/8" plywood. For the entrance, I attached stops of wood so the bar in front left a 3/8" x 2" gap. Ended up catching 4 for 4 swarms that year, the 4th being at my Dad's place. He ended up keeping those, and happy to say his are still alive today, him being TF as well. If you are curious about the dimensions, I can give them to you. If I'm thinking correctly, they came in right at 35 liters which is maybe slightly less than general recommendations of 40 liters or so if memory serves. At that stage, I had no comb, so I took some beeswax I'd purchased and coated the inside of the boxes with wax by rubbing it into the wood. LGO on a cotton ball in a partially opened sandwich baggie. I didn't realize just how many bees were around until I started swarm trapping. Hopefully things keep going as well as they have.