HONEY!

Today Mother Nature once again spat in the face of the local weather forecaster. The predicted cloudy with rain forecast gave way to a beautiful sunny day and I have been itching to get out to check on the bees. There have been a few days in the past week with single digit lows so I've been curious as to how the bees have been doing.

We arrived at the bee yard at around 2pm with a temperature of around 18°C. The bee hive was as I have never seen it before, I wish I would have remembered to bring my camera. I'm not sure if it's because today was the nicest day it has been in a few days but there was tonnes of activity and a whole group of bees hanging out around the front entrance. Normally bees "beard" because of high temperatures during extremely hot days or because of space issues. I wouldn't really call today bearding, but it was pretty close. This is what a true beard looks like.



I wasn't quite expecting this amount of activity and all I was planning on doing was quickly adding an entrance reducer and taking a quick look up top. That was why I decided to wear shorts today, but I haven't had any issues in past and my bees really are very nice to work with so I decided to go ahead and do my thing.

Based on the amount of bees coming and going I decided not to add the entrance reducer, so I lit up the smoker and popped off the top. About 4 of the 10 frames on top were more than 90% capped honey, with 4 others being worked on and 2 completely untouched. I decided to rearrange the untouched frames into the middle of the box hoping the bees will start working on them and surrounded them by fully capped frames for further encouragement. Once that was done, I quickly took a look a the middle frame in the box below and saw numerous amounts of fresh eggs in a nice laying pattern so I know the queen is still doing her thing, and doing it well.

After a quick talk with Mario about what to expect for honey production and fall prep, I was pleased to find out that I should be able to harvest some of the frames that are fully capped. While 4 frames doesn't seem like much they are about 5-7lbs of honey each, so I should be getting around 20lbs of honey. I wasn't exactly prepared to harvest honey , so I need to start collecting materials. Initially I planned on doing it next week but we have a large deck party coming up this Saturday so I just might get some honey for some Baklava and maybe even a honey based BBQ sauce for the 12 hour smoked pulled pork I'm cooking up. Yummy! I'll be sure to take lots of pictures of my honey extraction process.