Hello beekeeping friends, I hope you all are having a very successful year! Some of you may already know how we harvest our honey. I wanted to share...
On average we have 20-25 hives out for pollination at various local crops. So what works best for us is collecting honey early in smaller doses! When visiting our hives we bring with us several deeps (that's what we use for everything) each with ten frames of drawn comb.
At each hive we assess how far the bees have built out their honey stores. At this point, our hives have three deeps depending on the strength of the colony. We only pull from the third deep! If they need room to grow, we will pull full frames from the top box and replace them with clean, drawn comb so the bees can keep filling. We bring home the full deeps of honey frames,
harvest them and have them ready for our next trip. Because some hives are stronger than others, not all hives will be drawn out equally! That's fine, we only pull what is ready. Also, in doing it this way and keeping the hive at only three boxes high, we eliminate trying to take off heavy boxes from the top. Doing it this way for us is so much easier and , of course, you want to cause as less stress on your girls as possible!!
I would love to hear how your beekeeping season is going, feel free to share your tips and tricks!
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