Alpine beehive

[kopeelka]

This film about the maintenance of bees in the Alpine beehive in territory of Russia:

letitbit.net/download/1582.12365752e09ddc03ebe4fe736a/The_Alpine_beehive.avi.html

Who has similar experience?

[kopeelka]

I read that such beehives are very productive (more than 50!!! kg of honey) and are easy in service.

[BoBn]

I tried the free download and only got a partial (200MB of 696MB) file before I got a dropped connection.  I'm trying it again with wget from here:
http://r190.letitbit.net/download50/1582.12365752e09ddc03ebe4fe736a_5xmmc1h2m9krigfg/1165001/letitbit.net/The_Alpine_beehive.avi

I looked at the piece that I downloaded.  The audio is Russian.  The hives are very strong for the early spring.  It looks like there are 80-100  or so hives in the wintering yard.  The hives are all shallow supers.  Most are 5-8 boxes.  Most of them are painted with silver paint.  The temperature is shown to be about 5 degrees C (~40F).  Lots of snow on the ground.  Pollen is being collected from poplar catkins and willow.

I'm waiting to download the remaining video.

[kopeelka]

...the hives are very strong for the early spring.  It looks like there are 80-100  or so hives in the wintering yard.  The hives are all shallow supers.  Most are 5-8 boxes.  Most of them are painted with silver paint.  The temperature is shown to be about 5 degrees C (~40F).  Lots of snow on the ground.  Pollen is being collected from poplar catkins and willow.

realities of Russian weather...

[BoBn]

realities of Russian weather...

The weather looks like our early April weather in New Hampshire.

I have managed to get the entire video.

The video is about 45 minutes. 

Queen rearing looks like the Jenter system.

The frames are very interesting.  They are a strip of 3/4 X 3/8 wood for a top bar.  A single piece of wire (like coat hanger wire) is bent to form the sides and bottom.  The 2 ends of the wire are driven into the top bar.  I'll try making some.  A sheet of foundation is attached to the top bar by electrically melting the wax.

The boxes have frame spacers.  8 frames per box. The interior ends of the boxes are scalloped for the ends of the combs. Probably a scalloped insert nailed in.

Lots of unique homemade tools.
It looks like the supers are uncapped with parallel blades without removing the frames from the supers.
each super is dropped on a rack to lift out all of the frames at once from the super and these racks are put into the horizontal radial extractor.  Seems like it extracts 4 supers at a time. the racks of empty combs are simply dropped back into supers. 

I've never seen anything like that before.
It would be nice to have subtitles or an English audio track.

[BoBn]

A couple of pictures:
Frame:

Extractor