The Honey Harvest

The weather has been especially warm, dry and pleasant for September. The bees are very busy everyday bringing in pollen from heather, ivy and late flowering plants.

They have stored so much honey in a few weeks that I have had to put back on supers and move a nuc into a full hive.

I am pleased because it means that we will not need to feed them over the winter but I will still give them a block of fondant in early spring, for my own piece of mind ;-)

We were able to take one super frame from one of the hives. We do not have an extractor so we gently scraped the honey into a bowl leaving the back wall of the foundation intact. I placed the sticky bowls and frame outside and the bees cleaned it up for me within a few hours.

This one frame produced one litre of honey and I managed to filter about 200g of bees wax. I will take another full box of supers off the hives this weekend yet leaving them with plenty.

When I did an inspection of one hive, I found capped queen cells, plenty of drones and an unmarked queen. This hive had a marked queen! This hive had a double brood box and I had added a super also. I assume that the cells are supercedure as there was brood and eggs of all ages, the time of year and that there was only 3-4 cells produced. I did not see the orginal queen but I did not do a full check into the bottom box.

I apolagise for my lack of blog postings. I am working and studying at the moment and time escapes me. I don't imagine that it will improve until after Christmas, so bear with me  ;-)