Honey Time Again

Today we began the process of taking the honey supers off of our beehives, getting ready to extract honey for this year.   We took about half of the supers off today, and we will take the remaining supers off tomorrow.  Over the next several days we will extract honey.  Hopefully we will have plenty of honey to sell at our market booth next week. 

We anticipate about the same amount as last year - about 350 lbs.  But last year we only had 3 hives and this year we have 6 hives, so this is not good.  Several factors have affected the honey crop this year.  For starters, the basswood blossom season was very short and not good.  We had way too much rain at the time the basswood trees were in blossom.  In just 2 weeks we got over 14 inches of rain!  Then we had our largest two hives swarm, and that always reduces their honey output.  And also the air quality during the last couple weeks of the summer honey flow (when all the summer wildflowers are in bloom), it was smoky and hazy and the sunlight was greatly reduced.  This is because of the wildfires in California and Canada.  You may have read about how the upper plains area has had to deal with smoky air.  It affected the bees because they do not like to forage on dark days, and many times you could even smell the smoke.  On these smoky days the sunlight was greatly reduced, so it almost looked like late evening when it was really noon!   Harold and I had sore throats and runny eyes and sinus problems because of all the smoky air.  It is hard to believe that wildfires in the west can affect us here in Minnesota, but it's true!  Also, after the rainy season we got NO rain at all, and so many of the wild flowers were without nectar.  But we will be happy with what we have, and 350 lbs is still a lot of honey!

We both suited up, and Harold took the supers off and I kept things covered at the truck (and also took pictures!)

The inside of one of the honey supers.  This box has to come off, and all of these bees must go!  We used to brush the bees off with a soft brush, or use a blower, but that aggravates the bees and makes them mad!  We sometimes got stung.  Now we use a product called Bee Quick to clear the bees off the supers.  It is a strong smelling oil, almond oil or something like it, and the bees hate it.  They try to get away from it by going down to the bottom of the hive, and thus clear the supers for us.

This is the product we now use to clear bees off the honey supers.  A few sprays of this on a special felted lid will drive the bees down into the lower hive.  After a few minutes we can lift off the super with no bees on it (or maybe just a couple stragglers).   This makes for very easy taking of the honey supers!  After the honey supers are taken, the bees all have to live in the bottom two boxes.  These are much larger boxes and can accommodate all the bees.

This is the special lid that Harold made for spraying the Bee Quick onto.   A thick piece of felt lines the top of the lid.  Harold sprays the felt with several good sprays of Bee Quick, and puts this lid over the honey super.   The smell of the almond oil is something the bees just hate, and get away from, thus clearing all the bees from the super.  It does not affect the smell or taste of the honey, and actually doesn't smell bad at all to humans.  But the bees sure don't like it!  This is so much better than trying to brush away hundreds of angry bees!

One hive box completely cleared of bees.  It was my job to keep all the honey supers covered and free of bees on the back of the pickup.

This year we had a little different situation with the honey supers.  These boxes are part of our "winter hives", which are much larger.  Harold had to make some wooden extensions on the honey supers to fit on top of the large winter hives.  These supers were a little harder to handle and carry inside, but there was no other way to fit these onto the large winter hive bottoms.

And so our 9th year of beekeeping will soon come to an end!  Every year the honey tastes a little different, as it depends on what flowers and plants are plentiful during the season.  Next year our clover field should yield a lot of sweet clover for the bees.   Sweet clover is a two year plant.  The crimson clover we planted came up this summer, so there should be plenty of that in this year's honey.