Greetings everyone!
I hope everyone's honey production has been stellar.
I'm wondering about how to best handle post harvest from what I believe to be a super strong hive. At one point this summer they took 15 days to draw comb and fill 8 frames of a 9 frame deep super. I thought that was pretty good. It had ended up with 3 deep 9 frame supers on it.
Anyway, two weeks ago I took off 2 full 9 frame capped supers for extraction, I left one deep box on that still needed some capping. Since then they have filled a 9 frame drawn deep so I put on a third drawn deep on top that I expect will be full in short order so right now they're back to 3 deep supers.
This hive, this year, has always had a tremendous amount of bees coming and going all summer.
The hive configuration that I started with was 2 deep 10 frame brood boxes with a Queen excluder on top and I built up the supers from there.
I'm located about an hour south of Ottawa, Ontario.
Obviously I will have another harvest coming up, probably sometime early or maybe mid-September - depends on the weather I guess.
I'd like to keep my original configuration of two deep brood boxes over the winter but I'm wondering what happens if take all the supers off and try to force them from basically a 5 box hive down into two? There seems to be a lot of bees or is it just my imagination that there are a lot since they've been so productive?
Any suggestions on a reasonable way to handle that?
Thanks!
