Another update on my Darwinian adventure.
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Please let me know if anyone else is going the Darwinian route and what your experiences are. Thanks
I am and I said so few times.
Since you took the time to describe your location setup, I will describe mine a little.
Currently I have 7 locations, roughly placed along a driving route (some places I drive up to the very hives; the other places this is 300-400 feet walk, carrying the stuff - not much fun, but the sites are worth keeping strategically; I got stuck and yanked by a tractor another day - not too fun).
6 sites are currently active; 1 site is only a trap (I need a swarm captured to get this site going).
I intend to keep each yard population to a maximum of 3-4 units (if more, I will move extra units elsewhere).
If I have all my sites full, that will amount to about 20 units - my max # as anything above is not reasonable for me to manage.
Each one of the sites is simultaneously a trapping location too.
That makes it seven (7) swarm trapping locations.
Imagine a rectangle, 5 miles by 2 miles, the long side oriented North to South - that would be my beekeeping route.
Yes - it is a hassle to get to all the hives at once (have to be strategic with your time and effort).
Yes - it helps to stay out of the bees (some units I don't open 3-4 weeks in a row) - oh well and maybe for the better (set it and forget it).
But even my backyard resource unit I only open a couple times a month.
Granted I am not around daily and weekly even, I have to be proactive and efficient with my visits (and am doing pretty well on that).
I have the "Northern" cluster (4 sites) and the "Sourthern" cluster (3 sites).
The yards within each cluster are close enough to be within a mating range.
But the "northerners" and "southerners" are rather sufficiently separated to consider them not-mating.
Of course, there are other bees are around outside of my control (but no large commercials exist).
Currently my southerners are the dump-grounds/testing-grounds for the captured swarms with the focus on honey crop (for this year).
The northerners are largely a project on pseudo-feral population creation and my TF lines' propagation and cross-mating.
The northerners also overlap with a TF beek that we try to collaborate and maintain a common TF drone flying sector.
Why all of these?
Because this is how initially my bee-yards turned out (original owners who let me in just happened to be that way).
Then later the ideas described above came to mind.
With the ideas in the head, I seeked out and got me more strategic locations so to fit the existing program.
Will see how the season goes!
I feel I again will have more bees that I can manage (and less honey that I may want).