Yesterday, I took two shallow supers full of honey off of the original hive. It went fairly smoothly. (Despite being Friday, the 13th!)
I was surprised to have so much honey in the middle of July, especially since I had a fairly large harvest in the spring. But this is a huge hive, and we’ve had a strong nectar flow since April.
The hive was absolutely packed to the rafters with brood and honey. This extraction gave me the opportunity to provide more room and to get my supers straightened out.
I’m sure I had a reason to do it at the time, but my supers were in crazy order. I had a deep on the bottom, then a medium, then two shallows and then a deep on the very top!
The bottom deep was full of brood and the medium was full of brood and honey. I took the medium out to make the split. It was perfect for that purpose!
The next two shallow supers were completely full of honey. No brood at all. (I don’t use a Queen excluder.) I took those boxes off to extract.
The top deep was full of brood and honey! How did the bees know to skip the shallow supers? Who knows??
Anyway, I put the second deep on top of the first one and then put an empty medium on top of that. After I finish the extraction, I’ll add another two shallow supers on top of those. This order makes a lot more sense!!
My spring honey was dark. It looked a lot like maple syrup. This honey is light gold, almost white. It is ambrosial!
Well, I’ve got a lot of sticky work ahead of me. More later!
Related articles
- Doing The Split (romancingthebee.com)