Saturday, August 25, 2018

Merging the hives - 8/24

Yesterday I looked in the hive and saw the queen out of its cage and a few eggs in a few cells.  If I had a lot of space for her to lay, I would have waited a few days but I ended up adding a few frames to that hive and removing the sugar syrup. 

I add a layer of  newspaper with a few slits in it and then added the two deeps from the hive with laying workers.  I didn't see any more eggs in the old hive making me believe that removing all the bees from all the frames away from the hive, worked out.  I added the sugar syrup to the middle deep after refilling it.  There was a lot of uncapped honey in these frames. This hive lost a lot of bees.  I think many ended up in the new, hopefully requeened, hive.

Today I'm in the basement extracting honey.  I have lots of frames in the freezer from last year that needed to be thawed and then extracted, as well as a few frames from this year.  As I've gotten my honey out of them, I've been putting them outside, well away from the hives, so bees will clean them off.  This seems to be the easiest way to clean them.

I also had a bucket in the greenhouse where I had honey that had thickened. Also from last year.  I finished up warming that so it was all liquid again and these are now jarred.

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