Thanks, Curtis.  It seems this beekeeper wants to manage his logistics better and is satisfied with his staff making hive decisions on the spot.

I was wondering if [any] commercial beekeepers do large scale hive evaluations that hobby beekeepers would be more likely to do.  Particularly, the large operators who raise their own queens.  But I guess most commercial beekeepers 'only' check for diseases, re-queen regularly with purchased stock, gage their hives by their honey production, and combine underperforming hives at re-queening time.  Even treating for varroa would need to be done across the board -- doing mite counts and keeping track of thousands of hives would be very time-consuming.  Is my thinking correct?

Our LI Beekeeping Club once hosted a migratory commercial beekeeper from Australia who said that his 'measuring stick' was the weight of each colony after a flow.  Those that were under par would be checked for disease and typically requeened.

Regards,

Waldemar
LI, NY


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>>I recently worked on a system for a commercial beekeeper who runs about
3,000 hives between Florida and Maine, moving his bees arround for polliation
(most hives) but also placing some out in locations for honey production only.
He runs one or two supers over his hives placed for pollination, over an
excluder. Here is what he tracks:
 - when and where (grower, location and crop) the hives were first dropped
 - the "basis date", or date when the bees on site were last swapped
with fresh bees (he may pull
    the hives  from the original drop and replace with fresh bees;  the pulled
hives have honey
    pulled off, checked for disease, possibly medicated (FGMO) and deployed
again at another grower)
 - when the hives were pulled.
 - when the hives were moved (and if swapped for fresh bees at the same time)

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