another Rat scenario Pulling honey in fall

[Riverrat]

You have been putting off pulling honey hoping the girls will finish up the remaining frames in the supers.  You have 20 strong hives each with 2 to 3 supers in  2 bee yards. All hives have queen excluders installed.  Its late September and we had an early frost killing off the goldenrod and any other nectar source that may be left to forage on.  The weather man hasn't offered much help with rain and cool temps  for the next couple of weeks putting you into mid October.  Problem is there is to many hives to use triangular bee escapes.  Temps are to low to use bee go, bee quick or any other fume board methods.  Now we have to find a way to get the 40 plus supers off the hives in a timely manner without the use of the above  methods.  Robbing will be a problem adding to the dilemma.  How we going to get the honey to the extractor.  Fire away bee experts

[Dunkel]

Buddies leaf blower. Morning or evening the bees may be hopefully down out of most supers.

[kebee]

 Do as the commercial bee keeper do, have a smoker going good and smoke them good ,pull the super or what ever size box you have and blow the bees out with a leaf blower, extractor and put box back on for the bees to clean up.

Ken

[apisbees]

Rat Why did you wait so long to take the supers off? When the temp drops and the bees start to cluster and the bee they will pull off the brood on their own. A inner cover with a 1X3 inch or 2" found hole will work to separate the honey from the brood and will cause most the bees to leave the honey supers. An empty super under the honey supers no frames will cause even more  separation and will work even better.
The chemical fume board need heat to work, A torch on the top side of the metal will heat the fume boards. do that they will work.

[iddee]

Like Apis, I would pick a cool evening with a colder night coming. I would place the inner cover on the excluder and the supers on the inner cover. Top cover above all. By morning, the bees will have moved down to the queen, brood and warmth of the cluster. I would harvest before the temps rose the next morning.

[Riverrat]

Iddee and Apis hit what I had in mind for pulling the honey.  I have seen commercial keeps pull honey in the snow here in Kansas this way.