Sorry for not been able to participate much in the list. I'm still reading.
I am a bit oversold with the chilean and peruvian bees and now building my
first Egg
http://domoslisos.blogspot.cl/
Three kids and two rooms didn't work so and extension was need.
Why making it simple if one can build an Egg, right?
Anyone with experience on building thin concrete shells tha could share
tricks?


*BMPs Queen Painting:*
We have been painting all queen since I started the company 10 year ago.

We use enamel paint.
Use a press in cage for the process.
https://www.thorne.co.uk/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=4406
 I highly recommend the press-in cage when painting lots of queens per day.
Usualy one person just paints while each beekeeper check each colony. When
they find the queen they trap it with the p-i cage and shout  : queen¡.
Either the painter goes to the beekeeper's position or the beekeeper walks
with its frame with the queen already traped. We take records: Number of
colony, color of queen (paint), color of queen (phenotype).

As the international color coding use the standar calendar
(januery-December), and that calendar doesn't work for southern hemiphere
natural cyle, we have developed as a way of census, the protocol of
painting the queen at fall yearly closing (april) and again at start of
season after almond (september).
We change year - ergo color - for the winter solstice (23rd of june).

We off course have queen changes and most of them are supersudure. We
actually have and try to promote what we call the "double engine winter
genetic". Some 30% of our colonies change queen end of summer or
during/start of fall but do not kill the old queen. When spring have
settled we find the old queen dead at the floor in front of the hive. While
doing almonds they grow fast with two queens. We think is some sort of
insurance ;)


*Benchmarking*

We have finally finish the extracting facility. I´m quite happy with the
results but wonder if the through put is reasonable. I was expecting to
work the facility with 5 people, it actually need 7 to get maximun through
put.
I was expecting 100 super per hour and got close to 90 supers per hour.
Is that allright? how to define a benchmark to compare with?

Once again we had a bad season. We have manage to produce 117 drums (55
gal) with 2913 colonies (and are waiting for our last flow: we expect Ulmo
will give us another 80 to 90 drums of honey). Between 12 and 19 kg/hive in
average.

Past season was even worst with just 8.5 kg/hive.

*Varroa Monoxalate*

Following Fernando Esteban´s invitation to try oxalic in glycerin
(monoxalate/monoformate?) we are very very satisfaied with the results.
Home made recipe is described at
http://apiaraucania.blogspot.cl/2016/01/monoxalato-como-control-de-varroa.html
Some 3000 visits have that post already. Please report back if you are
using it.


Cheers

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