Post by petersanz on Jul 26, 2015 8:56:00 GMT -7
Hi All,
I checked on my bees this weekend in Forest Grove and wanted to get advice on when to pull honey. I've got three established hives and currently all appear in good health and have 5-9 frames of honey in various stages of capping.I run 9 frames in my honey supers. I've already pulled 2 supers of honey this year and now I'm wondering how long I let the current supers sit into July/August or if I should pull some or all now. The area where the bees are has a ton of blackberry but all that is flowered out now so I'm guessing that nectar resources are pretty scarce.
So, here is what I'm thinking my options are:
1) Pull all honey now and spin it out and call it a year. This assumes that the uncapped frames are far enough along with low moisture. Maybe not a bad option considering the dearth of nectar sources right now, although will be a huge shock for the bees to get shrunk down now - especially with the hot weather returning next week. Normally I'd wait another month or so to do this but seems like this year is different with the early spring and everything bumped up by weeks/months.
2) Pull what is fully capped or close to it and spin it out and then give it back to the bees to clean up and hopefully (?) use that to fill the frames that aren't quite full/ready and then plan to pull it all in another few weeks. Guess the only downside to this is that I've got to extract two more times instead of just once this year.
3) Leave everything another few weeks and then pull everything at once.
Any help appreciated - especially from those in the Forest Grove/Portland area (Todd? Drew?.
Best,
Peter
ps- I feed and medicate my bees in the fall so I'm not overly concerned right now about the amount of stores going into winter. I'll take care of that : )
I checked on my bees this weekend in Forest Grove and wanted to get advice on when to pull honey. I've got three established hives and currently all appear in good health and have 5-9 frames of honey in various stages of capping.I run 9 frames in my honey supers. I've already pulled 2 supers of honey this year and now I'm wondering how long I let the current supers sit into July/August or if I should pull some or all now. The area where the bees are has a ton of blackberry but all that is flowered out now so I'm guessing that nectar resources are pretty scarce.
So, here is what I'm thinking my options are:
1) Pull all honey now and spin it out and call it a year. This assumes that the uncapped frames are far enough along with low moisture. Maybe not a bad option considering the dearth of nectar sources right now, although will be a huge shock for the bees to get shrunk down now - especially with the hot weather returning next week. Normally I'd wait another month or so to do this but seems like this year is different with the early spring and everything bumped up by weeks/months.
2) Pull what is fully capped or close to it and spin it out and then give it back to the bees to clean up and hopefully (?) use that to fill the frames that aren't quite full/ready and then plan to pull it all in another few weeks. Guess the only downside to this is that I've got to extract two more times instead of just once this year.
3) Leave everything another few weeks and then pull everything at once.
Any help appreciated - especially from those in the Forest Grove/Portland area (Todd? Drew?.
Best,
Peter
ps- I feed and medicate my bees in the fall so I'm not overly concerned right now about the amount of stores going into winter. I'll take care of that : )
