Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

ocba - Re: [ocba] Honey collection

ocba AT lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Orange County, NC Beekeepers

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: Randall Austin <ra41717 AT gmail.com>
  • To: Elizabeth Pratson <epratson AT gmail.com>, ocba AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [ocba] Honey collection
  • Date: Fri, 22 May 2015 15:46:16 -0400

Hey Elizabeth,

Are you using a queen excluder over your brood boxes? Bees sometimes don't like working through an excluder. If you've got all that honey down below, you probably have a nice thick honey band at the top of the uppermost brood frames so you should be able to remove the excluder.

Do you have a laying queen? In my experience, bees who are in the process of replacing their queen (i.e. they have swarmed and the new queen hasn't matured and started laying yet) will fill up the brood nest with honey before working supers, even without a queen excluder.

You are right to be concerned about becoming honey bound. If your extractor is the type that allows you to extract either deep or medium frames, you could extract some of those deep frames. Another option is to pull a few out and replace them with foundation. Put the full frames in the freezer and save until later in the year when the cupboard runs bare.

You can extract honey any time you have full, capped frames. In my best honey years, I extract twice, once in May and again in June. (This year is NOT one of those at my place!) The empties go back on the hives for the bees to fill up again. If you had plenty of time on your hands, you could even extract single frames every day or two, as soon as they are capped (that's a strategy used when keeping African Honey Bees). But that's for somebody that doesn't have anything else to do, because the set-up, extracting and clean-up each time takes a lot of time.

I think most folks just extract once, after the flow ends in June. I do not leave full supers on the hive over the summer because there is a very real risk that it can be ruined by small hive beetles (the extra space is part of the problem), robbed out by other bees, carried off by a swarm or added-to by bad tasting fall honey, for example tobacco or goldenrod. Honey in the hive is waiting to be converted to money; it isn't safe until it is in buckets.

FYI, I've been asked to talk about some of these points at the June OCBA meeting.

Randall

On 5/21/2015 8:15 PM, Elizabeth Pratson wrote:
I have a question about timing of honey extraction. It seems like the honey
flow is not quite over (still seeing some tulip poplar flowers in the tops of
the trees), however my bees seem to be very honey bound, and running out of
room to lay eggs in the bottom deep frames. They are very slow to put honey
in the supers, and I was wondering if anyone had any advice on:
1)Timing of honey extraction
2) Is there a way to encourage bees to put honey in the supers instead of
the deeps (I saw something about spaying sugar water on your supers)
3) Do you recommend extracting now to open up some space in the deep frames.

Thanks for any advice,
Elizabeth Pratson
_________________________________________
ocba mailing list | North Carolina Beekeeping| http://www.theocba.org/
Manage Your Subscription: http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/ocba/






Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page