Ok, so it seems I skipped posting about our hives during the summer months. The long and the short of it is, the hive which I thought may be missing a queen (Hive Beta) was indeed a little weaker than the other (Hive Alpha), but they were both fine. Alpha ended up with three honey supers (two pretty full) and Beta had two (with one pretty full).
It was very apparent through the summer that Alpha was crazy busy - it grew faster and always had more bees around the entrance than Beta.
 |
| Hive Alpha (left) with one more honey super and more bees hanging around outside than Hive Beta. |
So three full supers of honey plus a little bit more yielded ... a LOT of honey! I only took the fully-capped frames hoping to result in honey that would be less likely to crystallize so readily as our last couple harvests. And they were beautifully capped!
 |
| Fully capped frame of honey - just a few empty cells on the edges keep this from being a perfect state-fair quality frame of honey. |
We've traditionally tried to harvest during the Labor Day weekend. When the hives were up at my parent's farm in NE Iowa, it was nice to have that extra day to travel up there, take care of the honey harvest, and still have a day off before going back to work. Last year we were much later - I believe it was the beginning of October, which was too late in the season. My theory is that may have contributed to the not surviving the winter - instead of focusing their September energy on the deep boxes that held them through the winter, they were still laboring on the honey supers. Still, we had lots of honey.
 |
| Honey Harvest 2016 |
Not enough to go into business, but then, I don't really WANT to go into the honey business!!
No comments:
Post a Comment