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!

I'm still not allergic!

In hindsight, opening the hives between thunderstorms may have been a poor idea, but I really wanted to add a third box to Jo before she totally ran out of room in the second. On Saturday morning, I sprayed the foundation with syrup, then opened Jo to give the girls more space. Immediately, there was an angry buzz with half a dozen guards head-butting me and stinging me three times! Good news: I'm still not horribly allergic to apitoxin. I did have a quick peak at one of the frames and found eggs, so they're not queenless, they're just not as calm as Meg.

Today I had another look under the covers and while Jo was much more docile, there still seemed to be more angry guards than in Meg when I had a look. I suspect it has something to do with the much slower buildup Jo has experienced, or maybe Jo's queen is just a little hotter than average.

I've got another box of embedded frames ready for each hive, and I've wired another 20 or so. My dad's hives aren't quite as far along as Meg as they're only half done with their fourth box, but they've been collecting nectar like crazy. It's almost surreal (and slightly hazardous) to stand in the middle of their flight paths and watch/hear them zipping past -- a bit like going into hyperspace in Star Wars where each star sounds like a Formula 1 racecar!