Our three hives are all thriving and we decided it was time to pull some honey frames. Our White hive is in its second year had a full super of 10 frames ready to go and about 50% of the second super has honey (but not quite ready). The Carniolans (Red Hive) had five good frames in it super Even though they are in their first year – we elected to pull these as they have quite a few deep frames in the brood boxes with honey reserves. Our Italians however…. Well, they have some massively heavy deep frames in with the brood – but only a little drawn comb on the frames in the honey supers. We left them alone for now. It’s not typical to harvest honey on first-year bee hives unless they are doing extremely well.

We ended up with fifteen frames of good honey (one wasn’t quite ready on one side – but we pulled it anyway). Set-up went like last year, but we did a few things differently.

First – I added a spacer between the deeps and honey supers in the sping. I had read that if you have a second entrance for the foraging bees this will help make them more productive – less travel to the frames and better heat control. It didn’t help much – they sealed up the entrance and proceeded to build out comb in the spacer. No worries – we decided to bottle up a few jars with good clean honeycomb.

Third – it was wicked hot when we harvested so kept the bay door of the shop open for airflow. This provided an open invitation to any neighborhood bee or wasp to visit to check out the honey.

Fourth – we didn’t do as well keeping tools and was capping contained. This coupled with the open bay door resulted in a huge amount of frantic honey drunk bee’s flying around the shop.  We ended up setting the bucket with the capping outside (still too near the shop) which attracted even more bees. Needless to say, it was an adventurous afternoon. Bridge was stung in the hand and I got stung on the thigh. We managed our first year with only 1 sting – but some reason this year we’ve been stung several times.

Our harvest netted at 42 pounds of the same beautiful dark amber honey we had last year. This year we used a little bigger jar (We found a deal on some 22 oz jars) for a total of 24 jars this first harvest, half have cut clean comb floated in the honey.