Fall Honey Harvest

Late Swarm Risk

About a week after our last check in, we went back to the hives, and the Barracks hive had 7 queen cells along bottom edges of frames. Yikes. A beekeeper friend told us we likely had between 24-48 hours before the hive swarmed. This means that half of the colony would take off with the current queen, leaving the rest of the colony with the queen cells. Yikes again!

We didn’t want to lose half of those bees and a decent queen!

After much research on hives getting ready to swarm really late in the season, we decided to try an artificial split. This was a really helpful resource: http://www.wbka.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/There-Are-Queen-Cells-In-My-Hive-WBKA-WAG.pdf

So we put half of the frames and half of the queen cells into each of the new hives – Barracks 1 & 2 🙂

Checking in about a week later, Barracks 1 (the original) had larvae and was hopping. Barracks 2 (the split) was weak with no larvae which makes sense as it had no queen yet. But the queen cells had holes in the sides (likely meaning they didn’t hatch properly, or one queen hatched and killed the others?), and there were 3 emergency cells, along with some cups and supercedure cells. Mega Yikes.

So we have been feeding Barracks 2 and hoping a queen will have a successful mating flight and come back to it.

Flow Hives

The bees in both hives started filling in the hexes in the flow frames in mid August. Within 2 weeks, they had filled a few of the frames, and by mid September when we did our final harvest, we found 5.5 deep frames (out of 7) in each hive full. This resulted in about 2 gallons of honey per hive.

Extracting using the flow system was much easier than with our traditional extraction equipment. That said, there are definitely ways this could be improved even further… but more on that later.

Prepping Bees for Winter

Now we are on to preparing our bees for winter. There is (yet again) more equipment to purchase, and more to do, but we have had a great first season and are really looking forward to seeing if our bees can make it through the winter.