Picture from the Lair!

Yesterday, I visited the Lair to make sure that they hadn't run out of room, and I think all three hives have just the right amount of room left so I didn't add any extra supers.  Here's the picture showing the final height of the three hives:

On the left side, the top super is about a third full, the middle hive (significantly taller than me now) is around 70% finished with the 8th super and hasn't significantly started on the 9th, and the right hive is only around 50% finished with the 5th super.

It was only 4 days since I added the top boxes, so with any luck and good weather, the nectar will continue to flow and the top supers will get filled out.  If not, I'll be stuck with some partially-filled frames, but I can either swap some full, lower frames with the partly-filled ones or use the partial frames to bolster some of our weaker hives at the Acreage (probably both).  I want 2-3 supers full of honey going into winter, and while I can potentially feed the hives sugar-water after we harvest on August 21, it will be a hassle and I'd prefer to simply let the bees backfill the lower boxes as winter approaches.  I hope to have around 100 lbs of honey left for the bees when they go into winter which translates to about 3 Medium supers at a low estimate of 35 lbs apiece.

First Honey Harvest

On Friday, August 6, my wife and I opened up Meg (our booming hive) to steal some of the excess honey the girls had collected. We chose 18 of the heaviest, fully capped frames in the hive and Rachel carefully brushed off all the bees with the bee brush. I think she was a little nervous about flinging so many stinging insects onto the ground in front of the hive, but we gave them a little smoke to calm them down, and only had to reinforce the message once or twice when they got too excited. For the most part, the bees just slowly crawled their way back into the hive to join their sisters after their crazy experience with the bee brush!

Rachel must have been particularly rough with one because she got stung through her jeans! Luckily she was wearing the heavy canvas bee suit so she probably wouldn't have noticed stings to the suit, and she didn't even swell up with the sting through the jeans. It's her first sting so her next reactions may be include a little more swelling, but I've found that stings through heavy cloth aren't much worse than mosquito bites. It's the stings to the face and hands that are really rather inconvenient (and easily avoided by wearing your veil and gloves!

After brushing and blowing off all the bees, we put the capped frames into an empty super we kept under a sheet to keep the bees from finding the honey (in the bottom right corner of the right picture). We ended up with 18 frames of capped honey which we stored in a box in our basement over night until I could bring the frames to my parents' house to extract the honey.

In the picture, you can see that a third of the top frame on the right isn't fully capped. Only three frames had any uncapped honey like this, and it is a small enough amount to make little difference in the moisture content of the final honey once it's mixed up. You can also see a gouge in the bottom of the lower frame where Rachel got a bit too enthusiastic about brushing off the bees. This "mistake" required some very tasty cleanup!

Stay tuned for my adventures with actually extracting the honey!

Moving from collection to processing in the hives

The bees have still been very busy with such consistent beautiful, sunny weather and some great nectar sources. In the bright sun against a backdrop of shaded trees the hundreds of bees zipping in and out of the hives every minute are really fun to watch!

Last weekend, I went through hive Meg and did some reorganizing to convince the queen to stop laying eggs in my honey supers! I simply moved all the frames with eggs and brood down into the bottom four boxes, and replaced them with frames of pure honey in the fifth and sixth boxes. With no cells open for laying eggs at the top of the hive, the queen should stay down in the first four boxes where the bees will be spending the winter.

I noticed that the bees have made a great start at filling up the lower frames, and they've started capping all the frames in the first two honey supers (boxes five and six). I'm still looking forward to around 50 lbs of honey if they cap it properly and continue to backfill into the bottom boxes in preparation for winter. Hopefully all the honey will be capped by mid-august so I can harvest it and get out of the bees' way for the rest of the year.

Jo is still making slow progress on her fourth box, and is about a third done drawing out that fourth box's foundation. I may have to add some extra frames from Meg to top off Jo for the winter, but I'm hoping that with some fall feeding, I can get Jo to fill most of four boxes with honey and syrup without any transfers.

Babies in my honey!

The first picture is a wonderful frame full of honey and about half cured and capped. The bees take nectar from flowers, stick it in the cells, and then process it and evaporate moisture until it's under about 18% water. When the honey is finished curing, the bees add a protective layer of wax to preserve the honey until it's needed.

The second picture is from middle of the same box -- apparently the queen has moved up into my honey supers and is using them for her bee-making activities! I suspected this might happen when the bees filled so much of the bottom two boxes full of frames of pollen, but I was hoping there was still enough room down below to keep the queen happy.

On one hand, this is awfully inconvenient as I won't be able to just steal supers of honey off the top of the hive, I'll have to go through and carefully mix and match frames of honey when I take it off for the winter. On the other hand, I was a bit worried about crowding at the bottom of the hive, and that the bees are using middle frames all the way up for brood rearing suggests that I won't have to worry as much about swarming (although that should be largely finished by now). Practically, I'd have to go through the hive frame by frame anyway, and ensure that I leave enough honey and space for honey so the bees don't starve in the winter.

This development does somewhat dampen my optimism about the honey crop this year. It looks like there will be a lot of honey, and I'm sure the hive has at least 50 pounds stored away already, but I'm hoping to leave 80-90 pounds for the winter and without a more accurate count of individual frames I just don't know what to expect.

In the future, I could use a queen excluder to keep the queen out of the honey supers, but I'm leaning toward letting her roam -- if the brood boxes get stopped up with pollen and honey, I'd rather have her move up than force the hive to swarm, and I'm not working enough hives that it's a HUGE inconvenience to swap back frames of brood when the time comes to harvest the honey.

There will be honey!

Quick update from a week ago -- I went through both hives frame by frame (skipping a few as I found everything I was looking for). Both hives were moving along slowly, both queens were still laying and Jo was still not moving much out of the second box.

I added another box of foundation to both hives bringing Meg up to six and Jo up to four.

Yesterday I look again, this time at a couple frames per box and was very happy with the bees' progress! Meg has 3 boxes 90+% full of curing nectar and capped honey and is working hard on a forth! Jo has almost finished drawing out three full boxes and while there's not nearly as much honey in Jo, there's a decent amount building up on the edges of the brood area.

Later this weekend, I plan to add a seventh (!) medium super to Meg so there's no chance she runs out of room, and I'll swap around a few frames in Jo to try to encourage her to start working on the so-far-untouched fourth box.

At this rate, I'm looking forward to 50-100 pounds of harvested honey depending on the honey flow and how much I can get the bees to backfill the brood boxes in August. I'll probably store some capped honey to give me some more feeding options if they don't collect enough in the early winter and to give me feeding options next spring.