July 22 Robbing the Bees

Today was a sweet day!  Hives A and E both have laying queens. Eggs and larva were in both hives and I was able to find the queen in hive E, she is incredible. I think the queens really do look like royalty, especially OTS queens.  With these new queens, all the hives in my apiary have  had the mite cycle broken which will subsequently decrease the Varroa mite population and with post solstice queens, the honeybee population will soar high above the mites. I have not seen any mites in my hives or on my bees. I have seen the occasional hive beetle.  
For excitement, my sixteen year old son and I robbed a frame of honey from the bees today. We literally took out the frame, brushed the surprised bees off and ran!  This is not the simplest way to remove honey from a hive, but for only one frame of honey this worked well. When you have supers on you can use fume boards or a bee escape board. Both of these methods will evacuate the bees in your honey supers so you have an easier time of taking it from them.  Because I went for making more bees instead of running for honey, I do not have a lot of surplus honey to remove. However, we wanted to at least sample the fruits of our honeybee's labor so we found a frame that was at least 3/4 capped on both sides and removed the honey along with the wax. The wax was freshly drawn, so it was thin, white and edible.  The honey was a light yellow as you can see in the pictures and it was oh so sweet!

Heather holding the frame of honey, heavy!

Scraping off wax and honey to the foundation. The other side of frame was almost completely capped.  You want to make sure your honey is capped as this indicates the bees have dehydrated it down to 18% water. If it isn't capped, it could ferment or spoil.

Isn't comb honey amazing! The bees astound me with their abilities to draw out perfect comb and produce the honey.  I read that one honey bee produces only about 1/12  of a teaspoon of honey in it's lifetime.  The contents of this pan from just one frame of honey was about seven POUNDS!

Stored in Mason jars

I wanted you to see the detail of the wax comb. This comb is fresh, produced by the bees less than a month ago. They secrete it from glands in their abdomen. It comes out in paper thin mini sheets.  From that they form the comb. The hexagon they form is perfect. This shape is the strongest and most efficient to store the honey in than any other shape in creation. God's incredible design of the honeybee never ceases to amaze me!

Empty wax cells, the black on the bottom is the foundation of a frame.

Honey comb, love it and love your honeybees!