Our four hives are doing well. The three new colonies have taken off with good productive queens and have been bringing in pollen and honey to support each colony. I’m thinking this year the honey harvest is going to be small. Starting over with three new hives along with the unusual wet and cold spring didn’t give us much of an early honey flow.

Our primary goal this year is to keep all four alive through the winter – so we need to be sure they have enough stores. While our new “purple” hive (far right in above photo) has an almost full honey super. It seems to be a minority. We did add a second honey super in hopes they will set enough stores we can harvest one box from them.

Keeping honey frames available for hives is key for winter feeding. It’s better for the bees and less work for us. In addition to the weather and new colonies, we need to treat for varroa mites by mid August. Several local beekeepers told us we have been treating too late in the year most likely leading to our colony collapse and hive death.

Our other two new colonies – the yellow and horizontal hive and strong with good numbers of bees, but not nearly as much honey in store. Those we will leave alone this year.

Finally, our long lived (3rd year) white hive has not done much in the honey super, but the second deep has some massively heavy frames of honey. This is unusual as it’s a very strong hive with a ton of bee’s in the box.

Depending on how many frames of honey are in the deep – we might harvest a few of those. I want to try and set that hive up as a single brood box like we did the others. It seems to be going well.

We are pretty happy and are hoping for all four surviving the winter. It seems like a 50% mortality rate is pretty common here due to moisture, nosema, and varroa infection. We are even considering some sort of cover to keep the whole apiary out of the rain.