Today's Progress

We took a whack at the leaning tower of bees today. The girls had completely cleaned out the honey comb from our latest harvest, so we took that box off the top.

The second box from the top was the shallow from our first honey harvest. It had some uncapped nectar here and there and two frames of capped honey. We put the two capped frames in the freezer, and moved the rest of the super to the party porch for the bees to clean out.

So...we're down to three deeps. We want to consolidate the deeps into two for winter, which will take some figuring out. We explored the top two boxes today....they both have some capped honey and some nectar and some empty spaces.

We're working on a game plan to get the best of the frames from these two top deeps into one deep and to put the rest in storage.

Today we just angered the bees, doing our explorations with a cloud of really unhappy bees buzzing around our heads. One bee followed me all over the yard as I put things away. I finally lost her when I stepped into the garage for a minute.

ABK had one bee still sitting on her back when she returned to the house. This little buzzy lady was escorted back outside.

Still no stings, which seems miraculous on days like today.

I fear that we are making mistakes left and right, but we learn more each day.

Today's note to self: we didn't use the fume board to get all the bees out of the top two supers before we put them on the back porch. There weren't that many bees, and our first thought was that they could just fly back to the hive and take the residual honey with them.

It was only in later reflection that I realized these particular girls had probably never left the hive. Younger bees work the inside of the hive....older bees forage. If these are younger bees, they may not find their way home.

We'll be more careful when we take a deep off in a few days.

We'll start feeding soon. I'll probably give them back some of the last honey we harvested, and feed them sugar water throughout the winter. The drought has been hard on the local bees, as well as most everything else.

It takes extra care with the smoker when all the grass is crunchy and brown. Don't want to set it on the ground and start a fire.