Fall honey, medication and feeding

It's been a while since the last post and a lot has happened, although it was mostly just routine beekeeping.  We harvested our fall honey at the end of August and, like our summer harvest, ended up with a lot!  I think we estimated we got around 150 lbs this year, which is around 12 gallons.  Several of the super frames had capped and uncapped larvae, so I didn't extract those, but I didn't put them back in the hive either.  I may put new foundation in those frames this winter, otherwise we'll put them in the second supers next year and hopefully the bees will clean things up and the queen won't go up there to lay again.

In early September we did our three applications of Api-Life Var to the hives, seven days apart.  I've never done any mite counts, so they may not even be necessary, but I'm going to err on the side of caution since they seem to be a prevalent pest in beehives.  During part of the medication I added a third empty hive body above the inner cover and began making 1:1 syrup to feed to the bees in the half-gallon quail waterers that I use.  I mixed in some Fumagilin medication to help with any nosema the bees may have.  I've been feeding about a gallon per week per hive for a little over a month and the average daily temperature is getting much cooler now, so I think I'm about done.  I need to make some more candy and then i'll be time to wrap them with homasote for the winter.

Crosswired super frames

After last weekend's check and lifting those heavy supers, I figured I should get some more supers on.  But I was also tired of breaking comb when extracting honey, so I bought some frame wire and tools to install it.  I put together a new super and new frames with foundation.  I don't know why it's taken me so long to try cross-wiring my frames; it wasn't that hard.  I bought a wire crimper that is helpful in making the wires very taut.  I don't have any equipment to embed the wires (melt them into the foundation), but for supers where they're just putting in honey, I'm hoping that won't be a problem and they'll just build out the comb around the wires.  Time will tell... I'd like to build an electric embedder, but not sure when I'll get around to it.

Since I only had one more super with 10 frames of foundation ready, on this weekend's trip to the hives, I split it up and swapped 2 or 3 foundation frames for full frames in each of the hives.

Hive A was looking a little better this week.  They had a couple queen cups with royal jelly that they didn't have last week, so it looks like they're working on raising a queen.  I swapped them a frame with eggs and larva from hive B, just to help out.

Hive B is doing just grand.

Hive C is starting to worry me a little.  I went through some of the deep frames closer and they didn't really have many eggs or brood.  What they did have looked good, but I decided to give them a boost as well and swapped a frame of eggs and brood from hive B into C.  I'll keep an eye on them and see if the egg laying increases.  Hive C did seem a bit more agitated than normal as I went through their frames, which can sometimes be a sign that they're not happy about their queen situation...

Hive D is still odd.  Lots of honey in the upper deep, but they're still keeping lots of comb open for the queen.  Heck, they didn't even start to draw out that brand new deep foundation frame I put in the center of the upper deep a week ago.  Like in hive C, what eggs, larva and capped cells I do see look good.  I was just expecting more of them...

I haven't seen any queens in C or D for a while, so maybe I should look closer for her next time.

Laying workers

Checked the hives today and things are going great in B and C.  Hive A has a laying worker.  This I know because I only found drone cells and they were very spotty.  Instead of trying to introduce a new queen, I'm trying to deal with it using the method described by Michael Bush where I will add a frame or two of open brood and eggs every week for three or four weeks and let the hive work things out by raising a new queen.  Based on this, I took I swapped empty frames from A with frames of eggs and brood from B and C.  I'll continue doing this for a couple weeks and check on the progress.

Hive D is still really honey bound in the upper deep.  It does have some good looking eggs, larvae and capped cells, but not as much as I was hoping.  The laying pattern looks good, so I'll just wait for now and give them some time.  I did remove one fully capped honey frame from the top deep and replace it with foundation just to give them some more space.

When checking the hives, I had to lift off all the supers and they were really heavy.  It's only been two weeks since we harvested, so I'm assembling another super or two with some woodenware parts I have in the basement.  I'll put those on when I'm done and adjust the new suuper foundation frames amongst the hives as needed.

Honey harvesting

After the last hive check, we thought it was time to harvest the honey.  So I spent a warm sunny afternoon removing the honey supers with the assistance of some Bee Quick and my shopvac set to blower mode.  It's amazing how well that Bee Quick works; gets all but a couple stragglers out of the supers and then I blow the rest out with my shopvac.

Based on the weight of the supers, I was guessing we'd have our best harvest yet.  That evening I went through the first four supers and extracted only the frames that were 90% capped.  We only have a cheap 2-frame hand-crank plastic extractor, so it takes a while because I have to keep flipping the frames to prevent frames from breaking.  Even so I always end up breaking a couple frames which just increases my resolve to start cross-wiring the foundation.  I returned those four supers to the hives the next day.  Then I extracted the honey from the next four supers the next evening and returned those supers the next night (including a couple replacement foundation frames).  In all we got over 76lbs of honey, which equates to around 25 quart jars.  Woohoo!  We're in the honey!  We're in the honey!

Hoophouse: Roll-up sides

Hive check

Haven't checked all the hives for a while, so with the good weather today, we decided it would be a good time for it.  On a brief side note, I put two supers on hive D a week ago and I did a quick check in the deeps and didn't see any eggs or brood.

Today I started at hive A and went through all of them.  I didn't do a frame by frame check on everything and didn't find spot any queens today.  It's also hot enough that I completely pulled out the entrance reducers.  I didn't see any eggs, larva or brood in hive A, but I did see a beautiful capped swarm cell at the bottom of a frame.  Lots of pollen and honey in the deeps, but it looks like they're holding a good cell pattern open for new eggs.  For the time being, I'm going to assume a new queen will emerge from that swarm cell, but I also transferred one frame with eggs and larva from hive B to hive A to help them stay calm.

Hive B was doing great.  Lots of eggs, brood and larva, so it looks like they've got a healthy queen.  I didn't see any swarm cells.

Hive C is also doing great.  Lots of eggs, brood and larva, so it looks like a good queen here too.

Hive D is pretty honey bound in the upper deep, but the bottom deep has quite a lot of open cells.  Good news, I saw eggs and larva on multiple frames in the bottom deep.  Not a whole lot, so I did swap a frame from hive C with eggs and larva in to give them a boost.

On the honey front, just about all the supers were getting very full and I figured we'd be ready to harvest the summer honey in about another week.  Right now we've got two supers per hive.  The top super on hive D still had a lot of foundation, so I swapped a few of those with full honey frames from supers on hives B and C.

Overall, I think things are going well.  I'm still not sure if it was hive A or D that swarmed, but I'm thinking it was A now.  Anyway, I'll keep an eye on hive A and make sure there's some new eggs in the next two weeks.

Hoophouse: Adding wiggle wire channels and plastic ends