A Super Day

[Chip Euliss]

Actually, I should have started the last round of boxes last week but it was cool so the bees probably didn't do much?  Guess I should have started a little earlier but better late than never!  Thankfully only a handfull of hives looked like this one:




My wife and I did 5 beeyards today; this is the last one for the day and it was just about 8 PM local time.  Time to call it a day.   Should finish by the end of the week and then I can start getting packed for our annual fishing trip

[apisbees]

Who's Ned whoever he is we have his telephone number now! Looking good. We try so hard to get all the hives close to the same strength in the spring but by mid honey season the number of honey supers on the various hives tells a different story.

[Chip Euliss]

Ned is well...you know.  Actually the number is my wife's; used to be our land line but we're all cells now and she got our original number.  Good deal though--she hears well enough to hear the phone ring and I don't   Oddly enough, the taller hives started early as 2 framers and the shorter ones were later starts and I used 3-4 or 5 frames to get them going.  The yard in the pic is a really good place and I put all my odd age hives there each year since food is abundant and robbing is minimal.  The 2 framers got the benefit of our natural fruit bloom and the others did not because they were started a little later.  We had a cool period between the splits (right after fruit bloom) and even supplemental feeding and switching hives around didn't solve the problem.  A bigger issue was a little EFB in some of my Italian hives.  Treated too late but the flow is pretty strong now so everyone is about the same strength in the bottom 2 boxes.  They'll all look the same right after I harvest the honey   The yard in the pic always makes a good crop.

[Perry]

Big differences between yards for me as well.
When do you typically start harvesting Chip?

[Chip Euliss]

Most everthing is usually done blooming by late August Perry but I like to start pulling honey the 3rd week in August so the will bees pack a little more of the late honey into the brood nest boxes.  Late honey is usually darker but the bees do very well on it.  I also feed a pollen sub patty right after harvest and feed heavy syrup as needed.  The purpose is to boost production of winter bees to help carry the hives through winter.  As many of you know, I don't extract to reduce time, so I just stack the supers (36, 7 5/8") on pallets with drip pans in my building and then dedicate time to drive them to the fellow who processes them for me.

[Les]

Great photos!  Do you use inner covers?  I love seeing the assortment of colors in your bee yards.

[Chip Euliss]

Thanks Les, I like the colors too but they are the result of me buying returned paint from Home Depot, etc.  I don't extract but the folks who extract my honey call me "Skittles"   I don't use inner covers because they are just one more step you would take to access the hives and would take up more storage space.  I usually have the next box on the bees just before they need it but I do "misjudge" from time-to-time as the one pic demonstrates.  I scrape the wax out of my lids once/year when they get home from CA since I'm going through them, frame-by-frame, then anyway.  I use a 1/2 inch rim under my lids to give more space for sticking pollen sub patties so the bees deposit more wax on them than ones with a 3/8 (about bee space) rim.  I built custom work tables that I move with my forklift so I can stand up (easier on the back) while I'm separating brood to make splits; it has a sliding box that allows the wax I scrape off the lid and top bars to fall into a container (a short super with a bottom) so it is easy to empty into 55 gallon barrels as I go along.