Honey, Honey!!

Today was our July field day, Saturday July 9, 2022. Here is the blue hive when I first opened it. There were literally only three frames that had not been worked at all in the entire hive of 30 frames! We removed five deeps of honey! We also removed some honeycomb that had fallen out of cross-combs frames and corrected other cross-combed frames. A new frame I had put in empty the last time I opened the hive at about position 12 or 13 was fully drawn out and had capped worker brood and honey in it. We only collected behind that frames.

Next we opened the vertical hive. Its top box was completely empty and the bottom box completely full. I will extract the five frames from the blue hive and put the drawn comb in the top box of the vertical hive to encourage them to move up. I put empty frames in the blue hive, they need something new to work on!

I wasn't going to open the tan hive, but it seemed calm today, which is unusual. I had the smoker going, which is a sure sign I wouldn't need it. I had put a bottom bar in the back of the hive for ventilation about a week ago. Today was pleasant, not hot. I had planned to put another wedge in the front, but they didn't need it, and didn't seem to want it, so I removed it. I did removed their entrance reducer to provide more air flow. They seemed really calm and were working the front two thirds of the hive. I didn't dig into it. I will do that in a few days.

We extracted nine frames another beekeeper had left from a dead hive from last year. That went well. I will extract my own frames later this week and put those empty drawn combs in the vertical hive.