I've been contemplating why the honey harvest this year has been so small. We had expected about 250 pounds of fall honey. But it looks like it will be around 50 pounds. In the spring we got about 40 pounds of delicious light colored honey from two established hives that we called "Apple Spring" honey (since we live across the road from a 15 acre apple orchard). It was the first time we extracted spring honey and I was surprised at the color. Last year's fall honey was strongly flavored and beautifully golden.
We ordered 5 packages of bees (3 pounds each) in late April which seemed to do alright once they got established. Unfortunately they had to stay in their little cages for almost a week (it snowed unexpectedly) before I could hive them and 2 out of the 5 lost quite a few bees. Needless to say, the bees didn't like being confined that long and took awhile to recover. About a month after that 4 of the new queens were superceded (replaced) which put them back even more for numbers. And then my two established hives from last year started a cycle that any beekeeper dreads... swarming. They swarmed four times each this summer. We caught half of them and now they are in their own hives and seem to be doing well. The picture above shows the first swarm from the hive... in fact, the first swarm I had ever seen in person. It was 30 feet high in the box elder tree located near the hive. It was huge! All those bees leaving the hive... all those workers going elsewhere.... a sad day. It's not so bad if you can get to them and hive them.... but thirty feet high is a little too high for this beekeeper. I tried to lure them down with some bee bait - lemongrass oil - but 2 days later while I was thinking about how to capture this humongous swarm they went aloft and flew away. It was very amazing. Here I was sitting on the tractor with my daughter and suddenly we were surrounded by bees flying about 10 feet off the ground in a wave like pattern. We followed them as far as we could but they flew out of site. I was sad to say goodbye.
The month of May and June seemed to be full of swarming. I almost dreaded looking at the bee yard. I would come back from checking on them and shout, "Time to get the tractor.... suit up... it's another swarm." And like I said we were able to get four out of eight of the swarms. Most of them weren't as big as that first one up in the tree though. We put them in small five frame nuc boxes until they started making baby bees and then moved them to a more traditional deep box.
Then at the end of June two of the new packages superceded their queen again.... yikes, another three week wait before new bees were born.... and now the numbers were really dwindling. Hard to make honey without honey workers.
So my contemplations about the small volume of honey this year bring me to believe that it was due to swarming and superceding. But like most bee keepers I am optimistic about the future.... at least now I have 11 hives that should make it through the winter (hopefully)... but even if only half live I can make splits of the spring bees and at least get back to the same number of hives and they will not have to draw comb before they can bring honey in. So as the usually optimistic bee keeper I will say "Next year should be better!"
Today's journey joy - Hope for a fall honey harvest
