The Honey Harvest 2025 (Part 1)

 

We started off the year with 6 boxes of bees, having caught two swarms and making two splits.  As things happen in life, you win some and you lose some (and sometimes you get rained out).  One of our two splits was successful - we lost one of them.  And surprisingly, we lost one of the swarms by way of losing a queen.  In the photo above, the swarm box on the far left was so weakened, we stacked the deep box containing the remaining nectar on top of the deep box in the middle (the tallest one).

This left us with four boxes of bees.  The other boxes were very active and healthy.  The medium boxes on top of the deep boxes are called honey supers.  They are called supers because they go on top of the brood boxes.  The brood boxes are separated from the honey supers by a queen excluder.  The queen excluder is basically a screen that has gaps big enough to let all the worker bees go up, but not big enough to let the queen go up and begin laying eggs in the honey supers.  The goal is to have the honey supers ONLY having honey - no eggs or brood.  This makes the extraction process easier.

When you go to remove the honey supers for extraction, there is a problem.  The honey supers are full of bees.  These bees are very protective of the honey.  This is their food source.  This is what they've worked for all spring to produce.  And these humans are going to rob it!  So you must get the bees out.  This is done by using a fume board.  A fume board is basically a board covered with a T-shirt and sprayed with an all natural scent that humans love but bees hate.  You spray this on the fume board and set it on top and the bees move downward.  That's the idea anyway.

A friend of ours introduced us to something new to try.  It is a board with a one way entrance.  The bees that go out cannot get back in.  We wanted to experiment with this new tool that might make the job of removing the honey supers for extraction easier.  So the day before, we inspected each hive and reorganized the honey supers, moving the supers that did not have capped honey down to the very bottom just above the deep boxes of brood and then placing the board with the one way entrance above the supers with uncapped honey.  Uncapped honey will not be pulled as the nectar or honey within them is too high in moisture and you run the risk of your honey fermenting.  We want to make honey and not meade!

So we lit the smoker and smoked the bees and rearranged the order, putting the one way entrance board in.  In part 2 of this post which will likely be posted Sunday night, we'll show you the results of this experiment and go on and show you the honey extraction process.  Ya'll have a great weekend!