What a bee yearā¦
After that last inspection, that showed wonderfully filled and capped flow frames, so heavy I dropped the hones super, we had a long cold stormy period of heavy rains. I measured more than 30l/mĀ² in a single night, with the rain going on nonstop for several days. I was more fortunate than others, my basement was not flooded, nothing was damaged other than little items that were blown over the property. In other regions the firefighters had a lot to do, pumping water out of buildings, clearing roads from mud and fallen trees, rescuing people and so on.
The bees were trapped inside the hives for a long time, consuming the honey Iām now glad I didnāt harvest before. They might have starved If I had!
I finally harvested on saturday. The guys from my bee club never managed to fix a date (thatās one reason I waited so long), so I called my mom over to help with the buckets and tubes. It was easier than I thought, mainly because I didnāt have to change the bucket.
I put another bucket underneath the honey bucket. My first plan was to stack the honey buckets, but that seemed a bit more complicated when it comes to bucket exchange.
Mom put the tubes in quickly as soon as I got the caps off. Wasps were all around and crawled into the troughs if it took too long.
We harvested the mid 5 frames only, for the outer ones were hardly even filled. All went quite well, only the amount of honey was a bit disappointing at first glance. Only half a bucket. No need to change.
The honey is quite liquid. My refractometer turned out to be broken, Iāll have to get a new one. A member of my club had hers at hand at our summer garden fest and measured my honey to have about 20-22% moisture. A bit too much for long storage, way too much for our german honey regulation. I canāt sell it
Iāll hand a glass to my neighbour, who lets my harvest hay and fresh green food for my rabbits on his property the second year now. But thatās about it, I canāt spare more. After having the honey sit for a while to allow wax and other parts to float to the top of the honey and exctracting the last two frames yesterday, I then filled the honey into glasses.
Roughly 7kg, including that half jar my mom took with her. And yes, the honey is really that dark. Tastes very rich, almost reminds me of cough syrup ^^ The bees must have visited my herbs very frequently. I guess thereās also a part forest honey in it (e.g. lice poop :D)
I got a calibrated scale for that purpose, so I COULD sell honey according to our laws if I HAD enough.
Next year will be better, I hope. Iām doing only late summer ant acid for varroa treatment this year. I think last year I did the december oxalic acid treatment wrong, maybe overdosed, thus killing off one queen and weakening the others. I created two spilts out of my strongest hive, but one didnāt make it and ended up queenless. I used those bees to strengthen the other split. Then I got two young queens and set up two new colonies, but one of those queens didnāt start laying. Again the remaining bees strengthened the other colony. I ended up with two successful splits, that were furthermore strengthened with a queenless hive I got from a fellow bee keeper. I shook all those bees off their combs near my hives. They gathered at my raised bed instead of begging into a hiveā¦
I had to treat them like a swarm and brushed them into a split box. After adding a honey comb, the remaining bees started walking into the box and I shook them off again some days later, after having the split box sit on top of one hive. This time it worked better, they gathered at the hive front and then walked into the hive.
The hive is that tall because the queenless colony came with a box with top bars only and the comb was not removable. I put the small box into my langstroth box and mounted the broken but honeyfilled old combs into langstroth frames, which I then put into another box and installed those two boxes over foil with a small gap. So the bees would get up there to retrieve the honey, but would not start using those two boxes as part of their hive.
After all this fuzzing around the bees finally settled and all hives seem to be doing well now. Iāll start varroa treatment as soon as the weather calms down. I refuse to open a hive during or right before a stormā¦
I need to check if the splits have enough combs to store enough food. I donāt think theyāll build more comb at this point of the year. Maybe Iāll take some frames from the hive that had no honey super on. The colony has two brood boxes, but didnāt really fill them out at m last inspection, so they might as well winter in only one box and donate the other combs to the youngsters.
And thus I hope Iāll have 5 buzzing colonies next year to yield much more honeyā¦
Depends on how long you let them drain, I suppose. I left my frames open for about 2.5 hours. The last half hour, I only got 500ml per frame more, but it was worth it to me as the water content was much lower in the last portion (16.5% vs 17.5% for the portion from the first 2 hours).
Happy for you and jealous about your nice full Flow frames!! Your harvest bucket is cool too 
However, Iām not sure that I can get my hands on enough corks of the suitable size (I donāt drink wineā¦)
) I do use my blouse for brood inspections, mainly for the hair reason, but Iām also calmer myself if Iām sure no bee can fly in my face. And I pull my socks over the legs of my pants to not have curious bees crawl up my legs.
