I just harvested my first honey this week. We had a crazy huge blackberry/black raspberry bloom, and I pulled my first super of that honey. It's the earliest I've ever harvested.
5 of my 8 hives are plugging along nicely. We are in a little bit of a dearth right now before sourwood starts. Not enough to cause a panic, but enough that no one is drawing comb. Well actually that's not true, 1 hive, and only 1, seems to have found something that's keeping them drawing and bringing in some nectar, which none of the other hives have found. This is intriguing to me; I wonder why this hive was able to find something the others didn't. Flew farther? Less picky? Who knows.
Of the 3 hives that are struggling, one was a late split whose queen didn't return from a mating flight, so I'm in the middle of a second queen rearing cycle in that hive. The other two hives are a split pair, the mother queen and the daughter. The parent hive grew nicely, so I split them in late April or early May. For some reason the mother queen's hive didn't grow after that, and she was barely laying, so I culled her recently and they are raising a queen from a frame of my best queen's eggs. The daughter queen seemed to be doing well, but recently her brood pattern has started to look a little spotty and their mite load was way up, so she's on the hot seat to turn things around. I'll see how she looks this week. Maybe I'll do a round of German varroa trapping with her as an experiment.