Prepping for Honey

I have been asked a lot recently about honey. No we don't have honey yet, but the bees do!  In the top of the hive, in the honey supers, honey is being added every day. The supers had some weight to them but weren't quite full last week. 

A full honey super can weigh 40lbs. Now not all of that is honey, but most of it is. In the bottom boxes where the baby bees live, we use 10 frames per box and that is what the hive is designed to hold. That gives a maximum amount of frames and wax for the bees while maintaining bee space. Bee space is the distance between frames. Bees have a certain amount they really like.

I cheat.  I use that knowledge to make my life easier. In the honey supers or honey boxes, I use nine frames evenly spaced. The top picture shows a frame comb that I use to evenly space nine frames in a 10 frame box. This encourages the bees to build out the frame farther so they maintain their bee space and make it easier for me to harvest the honey.

Yeah, I am sneaky like that. 

This is a quick picture of Snow's hive. She is also known as Hive 1. She and her bees are doing nicely at the moment bringing back loads of pollen and nectar. We really need rain to plump up the nectaries in the flowers. 

Go bees!

National Honey Bee Awareness Day

Happy Honey Bee Day!

Celebrate bees by slowing down and looking at them at work and then try the fruits of their labors - honey!

As a beekeeper I am in a really frustrating place right now. If I were further along in my beekeeping career, I'd have plenty of built out frames (where the bees built out honeycomb) and would be ready to jump in to the HUGE nectar flow that is happening right NOW.

But I am still a newbee and barely have enough equipment for one hive let alone the three that grace my yard. And I need an extractor in the very worst way. I need one and I need it yesterday.

What's happening is that the bees are putting honey into the spots where babies should go because there is no where else to put it. (See I need more equipment!) So if there is honey where babies go, the queen will stop laying. This is soo bad. We need LOTS of bees to make it through the winter. They snuggle to keep warm and if there aren't enough bees, they will freeze to death.

That is what happened to one hive last year and I really don't want to experience that again.

Soo, to solve my lack of equipment problem, I need an extractor to get the honey out of the brood chamber so the queen can lay all the beautiful eggs she can. Then I need to put a people honey chamber on the hive so the workers have places to put the honey.

I will feed the girls back their honey in October when the need to fill the hive with honey for the long winter. The queen will have stopped laying eggs by then anyway.

My options are plentiful - many wonderful people are beekeepers and have offered to loan me their extractor. Alas, since I don't have my own, I have to spend the best days of honey production, not collecting honey for ME, but calling to borrow an extractor.

And after that, I will still need an extractor in two weeks to harvest the honey. Now that's a sweet thought!