Sign up, and you'll be able to vote in polls. Sign up
Jun 25, 2017
7:45:22am
Acorn All-American
I inspected my honey hives yesterday too. Guessing 100+ lbs of honey this year
I expect we will be harvesting in the next 4-6 weeks, depending on when they finish up (when the honey is ready to harvest, the bees put a wax cap over the top). I am making a video of this year's harvest, A-Z for my friends and family and I will post it here as I know there are a few people interested in this stuff. 100 lbs is not great for three hives (100 lbs per hive is good) and for reference, I got about 50 pounds last year with two hives, but the three hives have been very interesting to watch this year:

One was super early, made about 45 lbs of honey, then went crazy swarming. We did splits to prevent the swarming, but it didn't help. It kept swarming and swarming and hasn't made any honey since early April. I made a couple of youtube videos of this hive to show my family. It was exploding with bees. If they hadn't swarmed, I might have had 150 lbs of honey from this single colony...

Another was pretty early, not as early as the first. We thought the bees were more aggressive than we liked, so we let the colony swarm (new queen means new bees) and the swarming didn't impact it as much as the first one I described. When it swarmed it had probably 30 lbs of honey, it has recovered and the bees have made maybe another 10 lbs of honey. The honey flow (flowers) is just about up here, so I don't know how much more they will make but hoping for a little more.

The last colony came out of winter small and weak (despite using the same process as the other two). The queen didn't seem very strong and didn't seem to be laying much. We contemplated replacing her, but decided if the colony failed we would just replace it with a swarm. The colony never swarmed and we put on the first honey super two weeks ago. The bees are cranking there. We probably should have put two honey boxes on instead of one - the box is overflowing with honey (about 30 lbs) within two weeks and we added another one yesterday. In a strong honey flow a colony can easily fill a box in a week, we just didn't expect it from this colony this late in the season. Not sure if the flowers have another couple of weeks in them, but if they do, I expect this colony will give me another 30 lbs of honey.

This hobby is pretty fascinating to me.
This message has been modified
Originally posted on Jun 25, 2017 at 7:45:22am
Message modified by Acorn on Jun 25, 2017 at 7:48:52am
Message modified by Acorn on Jun 25, 2017 at 7:49:23am
Message modified by Acorn on Jun 25, 2017 at 7:50:15am
Message modified by Acorn on Jun 25, 2017 at 7:51:32am
Message modified by Acorn on Jun 25, 2017 at 7:55:06am
Acorn
Bio page
Acorn
Joined
Nov 25, 2004
Last login
May 2, 2024
Total posts
18,661 (2,184 FO)
Messages
Author
Time

Posting on CougarBoard

In order to post, you will need to either sign up or log in.