Well once again the honey harvest has exceeded what I planned for. A total of 10 medium supers were pulled from the hives this year, which gave us right around 200 lbs of honey. We had enough jars and bottles to get about 140 pounds put away, leaving almost a full 5 gallon bucket of honey that still needs to be processed, thankfully the jars are on their way.
Now it is time to start to put the bees back so that they can gather some Fall honey and get ready for the Winter. I personally enjoy the Fall honey as much as the Spring and Summer honey.
So it looks like we are going to have a few hives that are producing a nice amount of honey. I have three hives each with 3 boxes of honey that I can take from each. If each box weights about 40 pounds I should finally break the 100 lbs mark that I was just under last year. It has been a rather odd and busy season overall for me. I have been trying to rebuild after a pretty big winter loss and so far am right back where I was with the number of hives.
Well I am working on the next upgrade of the site. It looks like the layout is likely to change a bit. I am not sure if I am going to mess around with the look a ton at this point, but we shall see. The new layout isn't bad, just different. I am hoping to see if I can choose another theme in the near future, but that may or may not happen. I find it harder and harder to stay on the computer when I get home or at least be as productive in the design space as I was in the past.
Regardless I hope the design changes don't t bother people too much.
Well it has been a crazy Spring here. There has been a lot of shuffling boxes trying to keep the honey that I had on a few of the overwintered colonies safe from getting robbed by other hives. It has been a rebuilding year so trying to split the hives I have currently to make new hives has been a process. I also ordered a few new queens so I have been working on getting them off and running. At this point I am close to the same number of colonies as I had last year. Right about 8 now but heading towards 12.
It is now the first week of April and we have had a few days where the temperatures were at least above 50. This means that I was able to go and check on the bees and see how we did after a cold spell from the end of February throughout most of March. There were 11 colonies when we went into the Winter and it appeared that we had 11 colonies when we had a 50 plus degree day in February. However as I walked into the bee yard this month I had a sinking feeling it wasn't going to be a good day.
So I have been working on doing some simple updates on the website so if you are watching you may have noticed the color changes and broken images that have been happening recently. I think I have put things back as needed and will keep on working to make sure the site is fully functional in the coming months.
Just a quick update it was warmer today than yesterday so I stopped by the hive again to see if there was anything that would let me know how the bees were doing. Thankfully I saw a bunch of activity. Granted it was them carrying out the dead, but this is something that a normal healthy hive does. So hopefully it wasn't too stressful and the bees can make it the next four months till we start to get some warmer days
This winter hasn't been one that we have seen the snow that the other areas near by have seen. Buffalo has already had about 90 inches of snow, and this week had sustained colds well below freezing. We simply had high winds and cold temperatures. Each day I heard the wind howl all I could think about is if the lids were on the hives and hoping that the trees weren't falling over on them.
So we made it. Spring has arrived and the hives are starting to kick into gear collecting pollen and nectar, getting ready to make more bees for the Summer. All and all I made it through with the 5 hives but have a bit of a queen issue in at least one of them. The odd things is even when I put in eggs they won't raise a new queen and I can't find the current queen. I have put eggs and larva in the hive twice and they haven't produced a single queen cell. So there has to be a queen in the hive but I can't seem to find her.
Well we have had a few nice days and the Maple trees are starting to bud out. At the end of February we had a few nice days and I was able to get in and check on the bees. Out of the seven colonies that we had going into winter it appears that we currently have 5 that have made it this far. We lost two that were nucleus colonies that I was trying to overwinter. It appears that they simply ran out of food, which is so sad. Most of my loses in the past I think have been due to other problems that weren't food related, so loosing two colonies this way is incredibly sad to me.