On August 4th I took some time to make some changes to a couple of the hives. Last time I was checking hives and harvesting honey I noticed that one hive had the large brood box full of honey and old pollen. The queen had moved up to the honey super and continued to lay brood. The hive had reduced in size and vigor over the past few months and i think this must have been why. Hopefully now that I have reduced the hive size the hive will expand better than it was. I also traveled to a hive that I have at a local friend's house. It had been a month or more since I went and expanded that hive with a new honey super so I figured it was probably ready to be harvested. Indeed it was ready to be harvested they had filled every space that was available and were booming. I removed beautiful full frames from the top honey super and replaced them with empties.
 |
| Deep box and frames filled with pollen |
I use the crush and strain method for processing my honey. I was able to clean the frames and strain honey through a course filter gravity style. This brings my honey collection totals for 2014 to about 30 gallons or about 180 pounds.
 |
| Reduced size hive |
