My husband is getting ready to harvest honey next weekend and then make his winter bee food too. I'll have to tell him about you. He only has 4 hives, but has only been doing it for a couple of summers.
This is my post on the bees. We just started last summer. But have learned a lot by mistakes, corrections, reading, meetings, and a bee forum.
A lot is common sense, but sometimes the bees do what they are going to do no matter what you do.
We re-queened a hive, (they were mean) well the hive decided they did not like the new queen so they super-seeded her, late this summer. Just now we found some nice brood. We thought the hive was going to be a dead one.
We are crank feeding them right now. We are leaving for Arizona in a 1.5 weeks so winterizing everything a few months to soon. This area is real poor for nectar flow. Right now the goldenrod is blooming, but we had a month of no rain, so the goldenrod has very little nectar.
During inspection, end of July, the hives were totally empty of food, no honey, no nectar, they did have pollen. Brood levels real low.
We started feeding them then.
We don't expect our house sitters to take care of bees lol.
But when you feed early they can swarm. We did not see any stored honey until mid August even with feeding the little buzzers. Up to 600 lbs of sugar so far.
I made fondant for them and the candy boards. We are going to put the fondant on the hives when we leave, the candy boards will be put on later in the winter.
We lost one hive last winter, due to mites, so we are zapping the mites using oav, the mites rain down. We need to do two more treatments before we leave.
No honey to harvest but we did get a great black locust harvest at the end of June.
Right now the hives are strong, will be almost mite free, fed well, extra stores, wind breaks, insulated lids. Wait and see how they winter. Last fall/early winter they flew until December, eating up their winter stores, we started feeding sugar blocks in January ow they would have starved.
We have all carniolans, nice calm bees, one russian a little nastier...........
The pond............cutting plants, pulling pumps, setting up for winter.
