>I am working up a slide set on efficient beekeeping and want to see what
list members do to simplify their beekeeping operations, whatever the
size.

I think that size is the key word here.

Perhaps the first thing to do is to decide what you wish to be - producer of honey, queen rearer, salesman for your (or other people's) honey etc.  It can be difficult to do everything well.  I am thinking of two large (by UK standards) very successful operations here in the UK:
One that just produces honey very efficiently, puts it into drums and sells it very quickly - job done.
The other runs bees, sells honey to a large number of shops in the area, makes other products like cosmetics etc.

Premises obviously have to be tailored accordingly.

What you decide is your goal will determine the equipment required.
You may have family members that want to be part of the business.  If not, what staff will be needed?

As to our own small semi-commercial business, my wife and I do everything, and although we did get to 210 colonies at one time, we now run about 130 - and as we are now in our seventies it is enough to keep as busy.  We breed and rear all our own queens (the most interesting part of the operation).
Our honey is sold through a modest number of local outlets to keep costs of transport down, with surplus honey going into drums and sold to a major honey packer.
It works well for us.

As to efficiency, we have over the years learnt to work smarter.  When we started, 40 years ago, colonies were inspected every 9 days through the active season - that work would kill us off now I suspect!

The most important tool that we have is good record keeping.  Every brood box is numbered (we run mainly single British Nationals) and every queen is allocated a number when she starts laying.  All queens are clipped and marked at that point so we know that they have been (or are being) replaced if we find an unmarked queen.

Our hive floors save us work - fully open stainless mesh and a 7mm high entrance - so no floors to clean and no mouseguards needed.  This configuration also reduces the distance from the bottom of the frame to the floor which has the huge bonus of preventing the bees from building drone comb on the bottom of the frames.  The floor is mounted on two lengths of two and a half inch tanalised fence post front and back, so good ventilation under the hives, varroa mites fall through, and the hive can be strapped easily for moving without any worries about ventilation.  No stands are needed, although I prefer paving slabs under each hive (we can often get those for nothing on Freecycle).

First inspections are done in early spring - ideally April - and are very thorough.  All queens are found - unmarked ones will be supersedures since the final inspection during the previous autumn.  Sufficient bees are then shaken from the combs to inspect every cell for disease and that is recorded.

Through the active season we no longer inspect by 'going through' the hives; instead we tip them, blow some smoke over the bottom of the brood frames and check for queen cells - it is very rare that a colony will swarm without building cells at the bottom of the frames.  This saves an enormous amount of time and effort.  Colonies making swarm preparations are split, with the artificial swarm inspected again after a week just to check that they are not making more queen cells.  If all is OK then we mark the record NFI - No Further Inspections needed for the rest of the active season.  We use a lot of 'shorthand' in our notes.

When we visit an apiary, we start by looking at the records and deciding which colonies need inspection - often less than half, so that saves us many hours of work and also avoids disturbing colonies unnecessarily.

We feed bakers' fondant which saves mixing sugar syrup, is easy to transport and can be fed at any time of the year.  We might feed in August/September if colonies are desperate, but it is usually October/November.  Fondant is placed directly on the queen excluder.  Supers are stored on the hives during the winter.

Honey extracting is kept simple.  I have a large heated uncapping tank which separates honey and wax.  I used to uncap with a cold knife, but now use a stainless steel hive tool kept for that purpose (they are useless as hive tools as the stainless steel bends too easily in my experience); it is so quick and easy to uncap and the hive tool enables you to deal with any low spots that a knife would miss.
Honey goes into a baffle tank and then pumped up through a pre-filter and the runs into a settling tank with 200 micron mesh final filter - so all ready to bottle when needed.  Stored in 30lb buckets which I can lift easily!

This year I tried a simple way of rearing queens - essentially by making an artificial swarm without queen cells from a desirable breeder.  So Q left on site in new box and brood moved to one side.  3 days later destroy any sealed cells to eliminate cells made from older brood.  The box can then usually make 3 or 4 good nucs.  It has worked really well and saved all the work of grafting, making up cell builders etc.

Hope some of this may be useful!

Best wishes

Peter 
52°14'44.44"N, 1°50'35"W

             ***********************************************
The BEE-L mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned
LISTSERV(R) list management software.  For more information, go to:
http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html