Just wondering ....  does anyone have experience with Macadamia pollination?   I am having great difficulty in putting this into practical context.

I understand that the best way of pollinating macadamia raceme is by hand.  That is totally beyond my imagination ...  just how this is done and how the labor cost justifies the increased production does not seem to compute.

The second best way is to use bees.   This also I do not clearly understand.

It is said that you need 5 - 8 hives per 10,000 square meters.  But what is a hive?   The data is from Australia and the States.  So ...  I was wondering how many frames are there in a hive?  In many parts of the world a colony can occupy two brood boxes and that would be presumably 16 - 20 frames in total.  That is a big difference in the number of bees when compared to a hive of say only 8 frames.

Does anyone know how many frames are in a hive used for macadamia pollination?  Does anyone know of the successful hive density per 10,000 m2?

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