STOP! THIEF!

The girls have sure been busy. Becuase of this the family hive has grown to quite the little tower. They were quite desperate for more room but I did not want it to topple over becuase it is starting to resemble the leaning tower of pisa so I decided I would "steal" some honey today.


This is a fume board. It has felt on one side and a metal cover on the other side. It fits on top of a standard hive. The idea is that you set it out in the sun for a few minutes and let it heat up. Then you spray some bee quick on it hitting the edges and making sure you do a zig zag pattern and then you place it on the hive.



While you are sweating to death and counting in your head to 5 min or so you try to contain your excitement while the bees remove themselves into a lower super. It actually worked quite well but I don't know if I waited long enough. There were still about 10-15 bees down in the lower end of the super and I believe they may have hitchhiked home with me. I thought that it worked so well that I would do it again and get a second super off the hive. Well, that is when the greed got to me becuase I forgot that I had an upper entrance. That means the bees had an alternate escape route. When I put the fume board back on the next super down instead of moving down the hive to the main entrance they started piling out this upper entrance. And then they started to congregate on the box. It looked something like this:
but a whole box or two higher. They were on the box that I wanted to take home and even after gently brushing them they were not interested in leaving. I decided it was not worth it at this point and decided that I would let them be. I started hearing the LOUDEST HUM EVER. Every single bee was humming in unison. Once I started putting the hive back together they started flapping their wings in an effort to ventilate it. I don't blame them. I think if I had my assistant with me we could have got it.

Here is a small update on the hives.

Tatiana - She has currently filled the newest shallow I gave her but it still needs capping. I probably could have taken 6 frames or so because they were 100% capped. I gave them a new shallow.

Brunhilda - She is doing very well. She has 3 frames in the top shallow that were not combed and 2 frames in the lower shallow that were not combed. She may need a super in a week or so depending on the weather.

Reina - She is also doing quite well. She only has about 3.5 frames that are not combed. She could have had a super today but I will give her another week or so. Her hive seemed quite strong as she had many bees coming and going. She has done excellent for her first year!

Typically if you start with nothing a new hive may or may not produce honey that you can "TAKE" in the first year but I think we will probably take honey from all three hives this year!