Jana coined this one I think – All-Honeys-Eve. That’s when all the honey is sitting in the garage, waiting to be extracted the next day. It’s a good feeling – you know there is a lot of work ahead, but it will be worth it. Here are the stacks of honey supers in the garage.

There are 24 boxes with honey frames, and we are averaging 9 frames a box this year instead of 10. You actually can get more honey with less frames. Counter-intuitive at first, but if you think about it, they still fill the space, and with 9 frames, there’s one less gap and one less piece of plastic, so more room for honey. Four of the boxes will be spun out for my folks, as they came from their hives. By rights, they should go home with a lot more for all the work they put into the beekeeping and extracting effort.

The boxes are staggered and I’ve got space heaters running around the towers, warming the honey so that it spins out of the frames easier (hopefully). We’ve had a pretty cool past few days, so doing this with the garage doors closed should help. We’ll see how this compares to the “warming wall” we used last year.

We are back to a tangential extractor this year from Lee, who got us into beekeeeping, so we can’t spin out as many frames in a shot as last year, but at 24 frames an hour, we could be done in 9 hours if things go pretty smooth. It’s sitting at about 92 deg in that corner now, but we’ll let it cool off a bit in the morning before working in there.

Last weekend, we harvested the supers from our colonies. Here we are, and to our right is our pride-and-joy colony that we are preparing to take 5 full supers from. That is a record for us from one hive.

On Tuesday, I went back out to the bee yard to inspect the colonies, do mite counts, and apply treatments as needed. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I was pleasantly surprised. All the colonies are “queen-right” with normal brood, and the mite counts are lower than last year – on average. We have one egregious hive in that respect – that means their mite count is at a level that it cannot be saved according to the literature. Well, I’ll still give it a try for period of time yet – kind of put it on probation. Another thought I have is to move the sick hives to the bee yard at our house while keeping the healthy ones in Iowa. That could help limit some of the cross-contagion affects that do happen.

Tooling between hives through the pompous grass with smoker and spare boxes. It may look idylic, but them bees in the large colonies were quite feisty when you start collecting several hundred in a cup for a mite check. We each got stung only once through clothing.

There’s a lot of work left to do though. A single mite check is only a point-in-time number. I’ll need to check again and try some different approaches to knocking back the mites some before heading into winter.

From all of us at Our Bright Acres, we raise a glass to you and wish you a pleasant and tasty All-Honeys-Eve! 🙂