Friday, September 18, 2009

The bees stole my honey!

After the inspections on Sunday, I put the coolers of honey on my back porch to be extracted later. I have done this several times before so I had no concerns. However, my wife called me at work on Monday to tell me that there were bees all over the coolers and all over the back porch!

When I got home - what a mess. Bees crawling over the coolers and a mass of bees flying around. I really wasn't sure what was going on. My wife told me she had pushed the top down on one of the coolers because she thought it was open. I took the coolers (after netting up) to three seperate locations in the yard to see what was going on. One of the coolers actually did not seem interesting to the bees and looking inside looked fine. When I opened the cooler my wife had closed the top on, I found that it was full of bees. Also, the third cooler, I found out had tiny holes where the handles were attached and the bees had found them. In both cases the bees were robbing the honey out of the combs and taking it back home :\ The cooler with the handle holes had lost about half of the honey that was originally there, two of the frames were completely empty! The other cooler obviously got slowed down when my wife shut the top completely so I did not lose as much. So after smoking the coolers to get the bees out, I took out the frames and placed them in other coolers and took them inside the house.

Hopefully all of this honey is back in the hives and I'll get it next time :)

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Hello, long-time reader..

With all due respect, you may want to reflect upon your statement about -who- was "stealing" -who's- honey.

Just saying, yannow, a little perspective might be in order when we start speaking in terms of 'entitlements' to the fruits of other's labors.

Rich said...

Of course Cibao you are right, it is their honey afterall :)