My first apiary harvest
This is the first year for my first hive of bees.
During their first year, the bees spend most of their energy and output into building the interior of the hive, and getting their population up. Honey production is secondary. So, if you want a first year hive to survive the winter, it is best not to harvest all of their honey.
This harvest represents 4 of the 9 honey frames which the bees had filled by early August. I will monitor their progress a few more times before the winter. If they have filled most of their 18 honey frames by then, I might take 4 more.
This harvest produced 138 ounces of filtered honey, enough wax to make a candle (the bright canning jar at the right of the picture), and enough snitching treats through the whole bottling process to keep my wife and I very happy.
If you're looking for a productive hobby, definitely consider beekeeping.
During their first year, the bees spend most of their energy and output into building the interior of the hive, and getting their population up. Honey production is secondary. So, if you want a first year hive to survive the winter, it is best not to harvest all of their honey.
This harvest represents 4 of the 9 honey frames which the bees had filled by early August. I will monitor their progress a few more times before the winter. If they have filled most of their 18 honey frames by then, I might take 4 more.
This harvest produced 138 ounces of filtered honey, enough wax to make a candle (the bright canning jar at the right of the picture), and enough snitching treats through the whole bottling process to keep my wife and I very happy.
If you're looking for a productive hobby, definitely consider beekeeping.
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The really cool part for me though is working with the bees and experiencing how wrong are the popular misconceptions about bees. I'm sure most people don't take up the hobby because it's intimidating. But the bees, depending on the type you get, are surprisingly gentle.
Just be upbeat and calm when you work with them: don't move quickly or aggressively. I personally have the Frank Sinatra channel on Pandora playing when I work with the bees. It keeps me upbeat.
It also adds to the cool factor.
If you get one, be sure to let me know if it works for you. I'm learning as I go, so if you find it works, I will certainly consider it.
BTW, it looks like UncommonSense has also worked with bees, or at least has some knowledge of them. So that makes three of us.
I tried to save the bees in a traditional hive but failed to find the queen. I have been getting ready to use the hive I got for new bees.
I think the big advantage to the flow hive is not that you don't have to inspect the hive, which you do. But it simplifies the post-collection processing. There is also a suggestion that since the bees don't need to make as much wax they make more honey.
But I'm mostly interested in the phenomena. With the number of people who signed up I suspect we'll get some nice feedback over the next couple of years.
I need to get more hives and more knowledge.
But still, not a bad first season,
And, after the little bit of "hand's on" I've gotten this year, I find myself asking what the point of the flow hive is.
Part of my "job" in the symbiotic relationship with the bee colony is to make sure that it is healthy: no diseases, no parasites, a productive queen, the brood not preparing to swarm away, etc. This absolutely requires "cracking open" the hive every two to four weeks for a manual inspection.
If the point of the flow hive is that you no longer have to crack your hive to get at your honey supers, then that still doesn't negate that you still have to crack the hive to do everything else.
What's more, if you don't crack the hive, then you don't know how much honey the bees have collected in their brood boxes or in the honey supers. So there is no way to do a rational determination of how much harvest is possible before endangering the hive's over-wintering food supply.
Perhaps the flow hive people have solved some of these concerns. I'm not sure that they can solve all of them.
And one more thing, I have gotten to really like (and I suspect it's a quite common opinion) working with the bees. I look forward to it. The flow hive, while neat, takes away some of that interaction.
The prairies came up this yeah in wide stretches of yellow sweet clover. As you can tell by the color of the honey, this is clover honey.
I will pass the "well done" on to the bees, although they really don't care about too damned much other than their jobs.
I hear that hammering a lot of tacks into a thin board and then placing that board tack-point-side up works pretty well against those critters.
They are pretty much booked through the end of the year.
http://www.honeyflow.com/
Well done!