At this time of year, normally, not much, but this year with so few bees around, it's value is still going to be more than 150 euro.

Normally when you buy bees you buy a "nuc", which is five brood frames of bees and a queen. A brood box normally has 10 or 11 frames at full strength, essentially for your 150-250 euros you get half-a-hive, which you have to get pumped up to full strength.

The swarm I collected is a queen and approximately 6 or 7 frames, so I got a lot of bees for my effort, somebody somewhere is nursing the other 4 frames of bees with no queen and praying like hell they raise a new queen.

How does a swarm with no queen simply raise a new queen?

p.s: am currently watching 1978, 'the swarm', with killer bee's wreaking havoc across the U.S.

150 euros for something you can only sell once a year sounds a bit limited though, do farmers just raise hundreds of hives at once?

They can't, it's doomed.

The natural propogation of the species goes....

Colony reaches optimal over capacity and all factors look good, weather, food supply, that sort of thing.
Queen is laying eggs like she normally does.
Queen says "Right you lot, I want 2/3rds of you to follow me"
Queen and maybe 20-40 thousand bees all leave to make a new colony elsewhere, this is what I caught.
The remaining bees try like hell to raise a few queens out of the eggs the queen left behind.
If they fail, it's over for them.
If both parties succeed in their venture, the bees have successfully propogated. The new queen in the old hive mates and Darwin does his thing.

Yes.
I just google imaged "bee farm" to find a decent picture of this, but all I found was honey farms really, but also google seemed to be suggesting I add the word "bohol" to "bee farm".
Well although it looks the part, I can't tell if that is a legit bee farm or not, but I can see why google would end up trending it, as far as bee farms go, I can't think of any other one I'd rather go on holiday to. So to make their bees pay, they built a hotel around them?

I guess what I mean is, how does one raise a queen out of the eggs left behind? Do some eggs become queens and others workers? If so, in a hive with a queen already in place does she just kill any newborn queens?

I'm guessing my question sounds retarded but yeh, tia

Any female laid by the queen at any time could become a queen. Left to their own devices, they almost never do. To turn one into a queen, the bees have to catch the egg on day 0 and flood the cell it is in with royal jelly. This contains the compound that turns worker eggs into queen eggs.
Then they have to enlarge the cell to accomodate the expected size of a queen. They will generally try for about 4-8 queens when they try.

As the queens emerge, they join the fight. They will attempt to kill any other queen, either alive or growing in a cell. All the bees will try to stop her/them. Eventually every body gets tired and queens start dying until there is only one. This is the new queen, she goes out to mate, the only time she mates, then returns to her hive to begin her live as an egg dropper.

With a queen in place, the bees will not flood a cell with royal jelly. If two queens end up in the same hive, there will be a fight. Queens kill using their stinger, which in their case can sting many times like every other sensible stinging creature on earth.

I was asked if this was legit by somebody in Eve, since I spent ages answering it, I thought I ought copypasta here.

There's no reason it couldn't work. Certainly the bees would use the frames and put honey in them. It looks like operating the lever will release the honey and it would certainly flow out as described.
But there are a few things I would be sceptical about. You should not harvest honey until it has been capped, so you would still need to suit up to check that has occured. It's not a big job, but until you know, you can't realiably turn those handles. Once turned there would be no turning back, I think you would have to fully drain the frame and bees aren't quite as fussy as one might imagine. A honey frame won't contain babies, but it could contain pollen, honey and uncapped honey you could not know unless you looked inside.

So what comes out would appear to be honey and possibly pollen. If there were anything else, like dead bees or moths and spiders you would get those from normal extraction anyway, so it's not going to make it worse. I would defintely filter what comes out regardless as pollen is certain to be in there. In small amounts it is great to have it, but the large chunks can smell like ass.

I presume once drained the bees somehow detect the empty frame and reuse it otherwise this is an entirely pointless device.

Once you steal the honey at the end of the season, you must replace it or they will die over winter from starvation. I would remove my inevitably expensive Flow(tm) frames and use regular frames and the bees would be up against the clock to get them drawn and filled with syrup. If they weren't expensive you could leave them I guess. In fact if they really thought about it, they might make a system that automatically fills the frames from a sugar syrup pouring spout at the top for winter feeding.

Cleaning is super easy with wooden frames of wax. When your hives dies and the hive needs renewing, cut the wax away and do with it as you will, scorch the frames with fire to kill off disease and pests and put new foundation in. This is a process, but it leaves no dangerous residue. With these new frames you would unlikely get away with disenfecting with fire, so you would need a chemical and that means problems, insects are super sensitive to chemicals, the amount of rinsing one would need to ease your mind is colossal.

So in summary I think its a great idea that will work but only under the most favourable of conditions, it won't alleviate enough of the hard work to be worth the both and will introduce new problems, like cleaning.

Also, extracting honey is the only hive chore that is actually butt tons of fun to do. The whole family likes to get involved. That little girl in the video fingering the honey would be having tons more fun messing around with knives and spinners and would get to finger a lot more honey.

People who make wax products would get no wax with this method either.

I think they will make money at it, but I don't see it becoming the norm any time soon.

Bunk, how's the bees?