Well, I haven't blogged much this summer for a couple reasons...I've been super busy with work and family camping trips, but also the bees haven't been doing much! We never did end up getting any honey in the supers this year. Oh well. The bee experts were really shocked we got any honey our first year with our first bees, and we've been happy with a little each year after...but now we can only hope they make it through winter so we can see was a second-year colony can do!
So on September 20th I removed all of the supers. At this point the honey flow is all over, and there is no point in keeping them on the hives. In the fall we want the bees to be storing honey in their deeps to eat over winter. My dad was on a road trip so I went alone this time! I spent about an hour and 15 minutes with the bees and sweat my butt off, haha! But I used weeds to brush all the bees off of every frame in the supers, and loaded them into my Jeep with just one hitchhiker. I wore my suit home just in case!
I counted mites, and ended up with about 2 mites per colony. Not too bad but we may treat anyway to be safe. I'm a little behind on everything this fall, but started feeding today too. I made some 2:1 sugar syrup (heavier syrup for fall), and put a pail on each colony.
A couple days later, once I had a chance to go buy more sugar, I brought back more syrup. Beeatrice still had some but Penelobee had emptied the pail. This time of year you should feed hard and fast, with 3 pails right on the frames. But, I only had 3 pails on hand. So, I filled up Beeatrice's pail, and then put two full pails on Penelobee's. I'll probably go back tomorrow to check and add some more!
So, no fun extraction day videos for this year, but here's one from what I did on the 20th!
