Happy Harvest Blog
Beehive reduction
It’s that time, time to reduce the size of the beehive stacks in preparation for winter, and steal their honey. I hate it. I don’t like taking their honey, and I don’t like the degree of disruption it causes, nor the death. In the process of taking the hives all apart, robber bees come from the other hives and there are disputes and battles to the death. Bees are very good at killing each other and the bee bodies pile up. I don’t know how to mitigate this yet.
The bees are working like they've had coffee
After the frost, we’ve had a warm spell, and the bees are going so hard. It’s their last charge to get their stores in. I feel bad now taking their honey, but they have more than enough, at least the big hives Pansy and Violet do. The other pollinators in the giant wasp nest have made their home bigger than ever. I’m terrified of them, although they’ve only stung me once, for banging on the wall, and I am looking forward to a long wasp-free future.
Bee day
I was reducing the hives to get ready for winter (taking supers off for their more efficient winter accommodation, which usually means taking honey off too. However, Sunflower is the hive that split, and they did not have as much honey as I hoped. I'm not entirely sure they have enough for themselves for the winter, and I debated bringing them down to one super, but I left them in two. Pansy, the new hive, had the tidiest little house. Just perfectly arranged, no burr comb.
Not what you expect when you open a hive
This hive....*head shake*... I knew right away it was going to be trouble. In the nuc box, they were already busy attaching the frames to the box. At first opening, they had burr comb and bridges everywhere - I figured they were going to be sculptors. Overactive wax glands. Plus about a dozen queen cells that time. I carefully scraped off all that unauthorized comb, but not even two weeks later, they've attached a sail to their feeder bottle. Not sustainable! Full of honey too.
OPENING THE HIVE
I got my first chance to get into the hive. We´ve had a warm, early spring, so I've been feeding them, and anxious for the right warm day to come, so I can give them the third super. They´ve been unwrapped since the end of April, but this is the first time I´m going to the bottom of the hive, and the inner lid is coming off.
Honey part two
After the honey extraction comes filtration. Have to get out all the bee wings, wax caps and bits of leaves.See my super high-tech filtration system.
Instagram.
I may not make a blog post every day, but at least I Insta.
Bite size.
