Despite the glorious recent sunshine, there was little nectar coming into the hives according to the ’shake test’. It is time to start clearing supers and taking away the honey. It looks like we are on for about 2,000 lbs (907 kg) of summer honey based on the full supers sat on the hives. Unfortunately, two of our apiaries have failed to produce any honey, or any worth taking anyway, but the other five did well. Including the spring crop of 1,560 lbs, we look like we will average 80 lbs per production colony for the year. It is late in the beekeeping season, and there’s much to do.
Honey Harvest
Anything over 80 lbs per colony is good, as far as I’m concerned because I don’t migrate my bees. If I did, I could probably double my crop, but I’m happy to potter along as I am, growing steadily and enjoying my beekeeping. The Mole and I have a solid week of extracting ahead of us. The time spent in a roasting shipping container, sweat trickling down our backs (and everywhere else), with our ‘extraction playlist’ blaring out, is not quite the highlight of the year. In fact, it’s a bit of a slog. Imagine if we had to do that for a month or more, as happens in large-scale operations.
When I search for the capacity of a Langstroth medium box, which is our main size of super, the average is about 35 lbs. We find, on average, that we get 30 lbs per box of extracted honey. If I count up my full supers and multiply by 30, it is normally pretty close to our actual harvest. Any honey left in combs after a 10-minute spin goes back to the bees in spring. Some people say 12 minutes is optimal, but I get impatient. One thing that stops us having a mega-crop is that we nearly always leave one partially filled super for the bees. This ends up moving below the brood box later on, then the bees move the honey into their brood box for use over winter.
Keep On Grafting
The Mole (my son, Alex) tried grafting for the first time recently, which is good news. It’s such a pleasure to follow the progress of queens from tiny larvae all the way through to juicy, fat, laying queens heading giant colonies the following season. It’s time for us to catch some queens and make up some nucs, and re-queen some colonies too. I think this will be our final year of using Kieler mating nucs. We find mini-plus hives so much easier (and better) to work with, especially as we can take queens through winter in them. The Kielers are a major hassle – they need all the care of a larger colony but much more frequently. We gave them a few years but don’t like them.
Checklist
The tasks at hand are as follows:
- Clear supers and extract honey
- Treat colonies with varroacides (formic acid/thymol)
- Keep the queen rearing going as long as we can
- Re-queen any colonies that need it, which is most of them
- Make lots of nucs, both National and Langstroth
- Get rid of any rubbish colonies
Using Up Spare Bees
Once we clear supers, there are numerous bees squeezed into the small space of a brood box plus one super. These bees will be dead by winter. The best thing for us to do with them is make nucleus colonies – a few frames of brood and bees, some stores, and a new mated queen – not very difficult at all.
Extracted supers are wrapped and stored wet, ready for next year. In April, they smell a bit like a drip-tray full of draught lager that has been left uncleaned for a few days, but the bees don’t mind.
Formic Pro
The colonies that get the Formic Pro varroa treatment will sometimes lose their queens. We inspect early enough (10 days after treatment) to spot this and sort it out before virgin queens are running around in the hives. The queen cells (and the formic acid pads) are removed, then we introduce one of our mated queens using a push-in cage. This removes the risks associated with late matings (in September). However, sometimes the bees will quickly supersede the new queen and make their own anyway. They don’t always do what we want!
Autumn Jobs
Later on, we will have to feed syrup to some colonies to ensure that they have a good weight going into winter. Normally, our nucs need a lot of syrup, and about half of the production colonies get a jerry can each of Invertbee. We add thymol to the syrup, in the form of a teaspoon or two of a concentrated solution of thymol in isopropyl alcohol. By taking the honey in early August, there is plenty of time for our bees to bring in balsam nectar (or whatever else they can get) to help with winter stores. We don’t seem to get ivy nectar here, which is fine by me.
Season Review
We had deplorable weather for much of this season but got lucky, particularly with our spring honey, which all rushed in during a brief window of warmth. The summer flow came eventually. I think that we saved many colonies from starvation by feeding syrup using frame feeders in early June; we lost a few, but it would have been a disaster without our intervention. Of course, if we hadn’t taken their spring honey, they would have been fine. The summer honey seems to have a fair bit of lime (linden/basswood) in it, and it’s quite light. Last summer the honey was entirely different, and much darker.
Colonies that changed their queen produced much less honey than those that did not. Moreover, colonies headed by last year’s queens (red dot) were the best, which is what we normally see. When I say “changed their queen” that does not necessarily mean they swarmed. Because we clip queens, any that ‘swarm’ come back to the hive, minus their queen, and we knock down all bar one queen cell. The resulting period without a laying queen seems to have led, this year at least, to significantly less honey than colonies that just kept on doing their thing.
This season we found that swarming was low at first, with cells being torn down by the bees, and then there was a flurry of later swarms in July. We have had several colonies that failed to successfully re-queen themselves, so they got a ‘test frame’ i.e. a brood frame from another colony containing brood in all stages. Most of those colonies look good in the autumn, but some just dwindle away and get shaken out. Once the summer honey is off, it’s all about treating the bees and making sure that colonies are strong and healthy with plenty of stores for the winter ahead.