Sunday, August 14, 2011

RIP Hive #4

Well Hive #4 finally died. It had been looking weird since early spring and finally succumbed to the wax moth. I think this hive lost its queen early on and could not make a new one. I let it go to see what would happen. I probably should have combined it with a stronger hive earlier on.

I did pull 5 frames of honey from Hive #5 and #M. This will probably be all of the honey I pull this year unless there is some unusual Fall nectar flow. Hives 2 and 3 looked fine, just not any fully capped honey frames.

More Honey

This is a report on honey collected on July 17.

I went down a box deeper in all of the hives to see what was going on. I collected some honey from hives 2, 3, 5 and M as long as it was well capped. I did not collect honey that was next to brood. The brood was typically high up in the hives. I am curious about what is going on in the two bottom boxes in the larger hives, but will not disturb them for another month.

I ended up with 11 frames of honey a couple of them in shallows from hive M. This came out as 40 pints of honey.