We finally got around to stealing some honey from our bees. The drought conditions over most of the summer made me wonder if the bees would have been able to find enough nectar flowers to end up with much honey. Neither of the two hives seem to have had any trouble, both had a full box we could abscond with and still leave enough honey to feed the hive through the winter. Both hives are now down to two boxes which should be the optimum size for them to overwinter in.So far the Warre' type hive seems to be a success for us.( see third or fourth link at side for info about Warre' hive)
Here are a couple sections of comb we kept intact to cut comb honey from. The bees in this hive followed the top bars very nicely and had few connections between combs. The other hive was less obliging and had a very interesting labyrinth of comb.Both hives had moved brood rearing to lower sections of the hive and were using the top box strictly for honey storage. There were a few cells that still held pollen, the uncapped ones you can see on both combs. We took a total of 30 pounds of honey from the two hives.
That is a small amount compared to standard boxes but I am happy with what we got. If we can get these bees to survive the winter I will be overjoyed.
Just to show how good bees are at finding anything sweet, here is a pic of one of the boxes we took off .This is less than 12 hours later and a quarter of a mile away. Within three hours of finding the box they had all the bits of honey left in the box cleaned up and returned to the hive. There were several hundred bees working there continually.
What an incredible picture of the honey jars! Good luck to you and your bees over the winter.
ReplyDeleteI'm so glad you're inspiring and educating people to do beekeeping in a kinder, more balanced way.