So I've been agonizing over what to do with the third super still on my hive. The problem is that the bees have only really drawn out a few frames and of those frames the honey is only about 50% capped. With the chilly weather starting to move in I really wanted to get it off, so yesterday I went out and took it off. I tried using a method where you take the box off and lay it perpendicular on top of the hive. If you do this after all the scout bees have gone home for the night it won't cause other bees to come steal the honey and nectar in the box. After a few hours of sitting there the bees that are in the box realize that something isn't quite right and will migrate back into the hive. Well when I went back Mario had decided to speed up the process and brushed the bees onto a wooden ramp he had set up leading towards the entrance. I arrived at about 9:30pm it was pretty chilly out and the bees had started to cluster up to keep warm, the only problem was they weren't anywhere near the entrance, so I took a stick and brushed them on top of the entrance. I hope they managed to find their way back in.
This is what it would look like, but without the use of a bee blower. You naturally let them go back in the hive.
When I got home I decided to see if I could scrap off only the capped honey into my straining rig, all of the rest I put into a separate bucket to feed back to the bees later. It seemed to have gone well, but when the honey filtered through by the next morning I was a bit concerned. Apparently I didn't do a good enough job at scraping because this honey was extremely thin. I also think that since Mario had started his fall feeding for the past few days there was a lot of sugar syrup rather than nectar. Rather than distributing thin and artificially sweetened honey I went ahead and added the bee feed to the straining rig as well. Once it's all strained through I will put it in some smaller buckets and take them out to feed back to the bees. (pictures to come)
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