July Field Day

Wow! We finally got a nice day for a field day. It was sunny and actually warm. That made it a good day to check the bees. We started in the horizontal hive. It had worked out to about halfway through the middle section. It was doing very well. There were several full honey combs, but not fully capped.

The insulated hive's top box was mostly empty and the second box down was mostly full but not capped. The next box down was full and half capped. We put it back the way it was. We plan to leave that fourth box from the bottom untouched for winter stores.

The smaller hive that was a split was completely full of mostly capped honey in the top box. We collected three frames of honey and replaced them with empty frames. We then put another box on top of mixed drawn comb and empty foundationless frames, every other frame. We found that the higher the vertical hives get, the harder it is to keep them level, so by mixing the straight drawn comb inbetween the empty foundationless frames elimiates cross-combing and gives us nice straight combs.

We then peeked in our new little split, made on June 24th. It looked calm and the bees were working well. We did not check down inside because it was a little too soon for a new queen to be laying and we didn't want to disturb them. We did add a ventilator under the top cover, though.

Next, we returned to my garage to extract honey. We extracted the three frames we removed from the little split. One frame was foundationless, two had foundation. All three survived vigorous spinnning in the extractor. We extracted a few more frames and bottled some honey.