Wintering Bees

Pulled the Apistan strips on November 4th. I fed sugar syrup until it became too cold near the middle of November. Hopefully, the bees will survive the winter though I saw numerous dead bees in the snow today and a pile of dead bees at the entrance. Nonetheless, I placed a festive holiday bow on the hive and am looking forward to honey flows to come.

Even though I don't have an extractor, I decided to harvest some of the honey in the full super. I scraped the comb into a 2 gallon pot and then through cheesecloth. The honey is dark and very sweet. It's mostly goldenrod with a bit of purple loosestrife thrown in for good measure. I'll be medicating and feeding with sugar water on my next trip out to the hive. By the way, when beekeepers are told to always use a smoker when working a hive they ain't kidding. I put a bee escape into the inner cover then put the super on top on Thursday. On Friday I pulled off the super without smoking the bees and was stung four times.

Super Check

I can't leave well enough alone so I peeked in to see how the bees were coming on filling the extra honey supers. The lower shallow super is now nearly full of capped honey, (7 of 10 frames) and the little darlings are drawing comb in the upper super. I can't wait to harvest the excess.

9th Inspection

Took a peek under the hood today specifically to see how much honey the gals are making for ME, and to look at the upper deep hive body. Three frames are full of capped honey and comb is being drawn on several others. The top super was full of bees but no drawn comb. The upper hive body contained several frames of capped brood and visible larvae. The other combs were full of capped honey. They're HEAVY and I dropped one into the super. Yikes! No harm done and the bees were remarkably docile today.

8th Inspection

On August 8th I pulled the apistan strips and removed lots of burr comb between the two deep hive bodies. On August 16th I sucked it up and pried apart and inspected the frames in the lower hive body. I couldn't tell, with my bad eyes, if there were eggs in the empty cells but there was larvae and capped brood in several frames as well as lots of pollen. I finished removing the burr comb and tidied up things in general. The girls are still busy drawing comb in the first shallow super with about half the frames drawn so I added a second shallow super. Man, are there a lot of bees at home during the day. They come boiling up out of the frames so I had to smoke them back down and used the bee brush to get them off so I could replace the supers without crushing them.

Quick Peek

I couldn't resist taking a peek at the top super to see how things were coming along, but although the frames were full of bees, no comb has been drawn yet. The ladies had glued down the queen excluder but good, too. I wanted to get rid of some brace comb in the top hive body so I pulled the first frame. There was a beautiful big arc of capped honey surrounding the developing larvae and brood cells.

Bee Cloud

On warm, calm, sunny days by late afternoon there is a cloud of bee activity in front of the hive. Click on the play button to enter the bee cloud.