It's late July. The bees have multiplied, increased, and become very productive. They were split many times this spring to prevent them from swarming. Swarming takes about half the bees from the hive as they try to find and establish a new home. It's natural. To leave the hive. Go out into the big world. It's how bees multiply hives. Start afresh. Unfortunately, swarms tend to be high in a tree. And their timing is usually inconvenient. Hot, humid, high in a tree.....The idea of half of a hive flying away is just so..... sad. My wonderful husband usually has to don the beekeeping suit, get raised in the loader bucket, and recapture them. (I do the tractor loader raising.)
But this year we only had to do swarm retrieval once, very early in the season, as opposed to last year which felt like at least twenty times. We made several smaller hives through the splits and apparently squelched the swarming instinct in our hives. So much nicer.
The hives were given lots of room to grow. I also did not use queen excluders this year. I was afraid that we would get lots of baby bees (brood) in the honey supers. And in fact we did get a few. But the excluder in the past seemed to keep the bees away or out of the honey supers (where they store their honey). But by eliminating the excluders, giving the bees both a top and bottom entrance to enter their hives, and having lots of room... well, we didn't get any summer swarms. And we got lots of honey. In fact, this is our second harvest of the season. And we should get a third in September. That's definitely worth rejoicing.
Yesterday, around three in the afternoon, my wonderful farmer's husband and I harvested the honey supers from our hives. Some of the hives were still too small to make extra honey. Thankfully, they have time to grow strong before winter. But the big hives had plenty of full honey supers. I used some Fisher's Bee Quick ( an almond smelling liquid that apparently the bees do not like) on a fume board to push the bees into the hive and out of the honey supers. Then, if there were any stragglers in the super, Farmer Husband would gently blow them out of the super with a leaf blower.
We brought the honey filled supers to the house via the Gator and placed them in the basement where our honey extracting is set up. It was dinner time when we finished bringing the honey downstairs. So we started the dehumidifier, put a lid on the stacked supers, and ate tacos. Today, I hope to extract the honey. Until then, our house smells like golden sweet honey. Very pleasant.
It's hard to imagine anything sweeter than honey in the honeycomb....
"Gracious words are like a honeycomb, sweetness to the soul and health to the body." (Proverbs 16:24).
O, may my language, my choice of words and my tone be like honey today. Sweet, sticky, warm and helpful. Not only will this be good for those I speak with today.... but sweet to my soul as well.
Honey. Life sustaining. Sweet and appealing. Good for my soul.
Today's Journey Joy - Fresh warm honey and gracious words
