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.

Nectar Flow!

Meg and Jo both exploded this week -- Meg's hard at work on her fifth box (4th is 100% drawn out, fifth went on a bit late last Sunday), and Jo is just about done with her second and will receive a third tomorrow morning! I guess that means the nectar is finally flowing -- I just wish I could throw GPS trackers on all the girls to see where they're finding the best flowers!

I noticed that both hives are a bit more touchy than usual -- especially Meg. It could have something to do with the weather, but I suspect that they're moving into "protect the honey" mode and my days of playing with the girls sans veil may be limited for the year.

As for the picture, in my last inspection I noted that I'd put a quarter bucket of scrap comb in the top of Meg so they could clean up all the sticky honey -- they didn't just clean it up, they reworked it into a single mass and attached it to the side of the bucket!

Low Nectar Flow

As my first year with bees, I'm not entirely sure what to expect, so Jim's blog has been invaluable. He's been expecting a strong nectar flow from pollen and basswood, but his latest blog post suggests that he's not seeing it yet either.

That would explain why my bees are making so little progress right now -- they're significantly slowed down as they have to draw out honeycomb before they can put nectar in it, but I've been expecting at least SOME faster progress when the local flowers start producing good quantities of nectar.

http://naturesnectar.blogspot.com/2010/06/my-local-nectar-flow.html