Honey Money

So far, Casey and I have harvested a little under fifty bottles of honey from two supers. We have sold between 25 and 30 jars for a net of $156.00. There is one super full of honey still on the hive that has not been capped yet. We will check on Thursday to monitor it's progress.

Still concerned about the other two hives. The packaged bees seem to be producing new brood but the activity in and out of the hive is very slow/weak. The split hive appears to have no new brood except for drone cells. At last check, last week, no Queen sighted but saw one Queen cell that had the side opened and the queen larvae exposed and probably dead. This is a sign of a new Queen that emerged and killed this develping Queen larvae.

Honey Flow!?

Walked out to check the bees this afternoon around 4:00 pm. The main hive and the middle hive had more bees coming and going than I have ever seen! The middle hive has been really quiet up until now. But today, very, very active. Hopefully not pre-swarm activity.

Honey flow? Maybe. Should be sourwood if it is. We'll know better on Sunday when we check.

Very Hot Weather!

It has been really hot and humid for the past three days. The bees are bearding so I pushed the supers back about an inch to help in ventilation. At this time, we have two supers on. The lower super is the one we extracted four frames from and the upper super has ten frames full of honey but the bees don't seem to want to cap it yet. Graham says that's because the cells aren't full enough. Be patient.

There's a slight possibility that within two or three days, we may have a lot of honey to process! That would be really cool! Graham said that sourwood should be out within the next two weeks.

 
The crushed comb and honey gets scraped into a 5 gallon bucket that has a "wedding veil" filter in it. This will be left to drain over night and bottled in the morning! The really cool thing is that all of the equipment, empty frames, tray, spoons, knife, scrapper, are all taken out next to the hive and the bees will clean it all up for us to be used again for the next honey flow!

 
Casey uses a knife to cut the comb from the frame. It falls onto a tray where it is crushed up. This is the messy part. Tended to get honey all over our selves!

 
Casey and I harvested our first honey today! We removed four frames. This is one of the frames and it is really heavy!

Honey Check

The top super is about 85% capped. The bees allowed me to open the super and pull up frames to inspect. No problem. However, whenever I attempt to lift the top super off to inspect the lower super, they stung me! The top super is extremely heavy so it's no fun to be struggling with a 70 pound super and getting stung on the hands at the same time.

Back to wearing gloves.

If the weather clears up tomorrow, I will take and post pictures.