Thank You Bees!

Berry season is almost here:

Thanks to the pollinators! Yum. This was the first of many backyard strawberries in our berry patch. The raspberries will be next; I can't wait!

I had to get another batch of supers too. I think I will have to store some full ones in the shed until it's time to extract. It's really hard to work the hives when they have five or six supers on. I almost fell a couple of times trying to wrangle them last year. Yikes! Not a good habit to get into.

What else is going on? Toby's queen all but stopped laying a couple of weeks ago. I was planning to replace her this summer anyway so she got swapped out for the new queen that was in my remaining nuc. The new queen hatched out of a swarm cell from hive #3/last year's nuc and was laying well. She should be happy to have a full sized hive to call her own.

The old queen (she'll be two in August) is in her "retirement home" for now which is a nuc box. It won't hurt to keep her on hand while I make sure the new queen gets established.  Still hoping the nuc can generate a few frames of drawn comb for future use....

Honey in June!

After making up four nucs (and giving three away), I think the girls are finally starting to focus more on producing honey than swarm cells. I've been throwing on the supers left and right to give them room.

Unfortunately, they are not totally done making queen cells as you can see. Here's a queen cell on the left and a queen cup on the right. This is the drone frame that's in the freezer now.

I'm at the point where they're too heavy to lift off the hive, even with the stepstool. I am going to have to pull frames off and extract early. I took 11 frames off of Toby's hive today. I'm planning to use the nuc on the left to re-queen Toby's hive at some point. Right now, I'm using it to produce some drawn frames and maybe honey for the honey bank.

The spring honey is really light. A totally different color than the late summer.