Already August

Time flies when you are having fun! June and July were packed for our family. We just returned home from ten days away (as a beekeeper I must stop planning time away during the last weeks of July as that is honey harvest season) and now that August is here we are officially home for a long while!! There’s no place like home and while we do enjoy traveling we are also very happy to be back home to our hive. 

There’s that saying…”home is where your honey is” and I have been so curious and trying not to worry about honey for so long now. If you remember, the spring brought some drama and concerns and for months I’ve been keeping distance from the hives and hoping all was going well. Observing the hives from a distance clearly shows they are very different. One hive has one super and a ton of bees all over it. They beard all the time and have a lot of activity going in and out. All good signs. The other hive has three supers on it but just doesn’t have the apparent abundance of bees. I’m not sure what to conclude about hive #2 with the three supers…so today we suited up in the heat and went to investigate. I was tired of wondering. 

We dug in to hive #2 first because it’s the one I am most “concerned” about. While I still didn’t feel there were many bees in there the third super had some honey in it – not capped but pretty golden honey. Digging deeper we could see that supers one and two were also full of capped honey. That’s great! In terms of honey supply I wasn’t able to pick up on any concerns. The hive is heavy and looks to be full of honey. I hope once we get the supers off that I’ll be able to get into the brood boxes and confirm that the queen is still laying. A drop in number of bees makes me concerned that there could be an issue with the queen. But that’s a problem for another day. For now, I’m optimistic that hive #2 will yield at least two supers of honey. 

As for hive #1…it was heavy and so full of bees we didn’t even dig into it. All signs would indicated the one super should also be full of capped honey. 

In conclusion, assuming we’ve made no major oversights and nothing goes terribly wrong between now and Friday…we should have at least three supers full of honey to extract!!! That’s one more super than we had last year, so in theory we will have increased our honey supply. I really hope it all plays out. I won’t rest easy until that honey is in jars inside my home! 

We are scheduled to extract with our mentor on Friday. I am very anxious to have him take a look at the hives and help us assess their overall wellness. We will need strong hives to make it through the winter. Honey makes me happy now but ultimately we will have nothing without a strong queen/hive. Stay tuned…I hope to have a happy report with lots of honey pictures to share soon! 

-Worker Bee 2021