As we approach August, we are starting to count the days until we try and extract honey from our hives. I opened each of our three hives up today to gauge the progress the bees have made.
This has been a tough summer. June is the rainiest month in Wisconsin - our county averages over 5 inches of rain in a typical June. This year, we barely received a half-inch. As a result, we have seen fewer flowers. We have seen a little more rain in July and plants are growing more.
I started by opening our one Langsthroth hive. We started this hive last year, and the bees made it through the winter. and established a strong spring population. I had high hopes for this hive, but I put the honey super on a week later than I has planned. I then checked two weeks later and there were hardly any bees in the super. I used a queen excluder, and the bees were filling in the gaps with wax rather than bringing in honey. I put an entrance reducer on the hive and sprayed some sugar solution on the frames to coax the bees. They have slowly been drawing out comb, but with hot July weather and lack of forage in June, it seems like I missed my window. The bees have 4 weeks left, but I feel like this hive will produce no honey for a second year.
The big surprise has been the two Layens hives. Maggie started these this year with package bees. One hive has nearly filled all 20 frames with honey and brood. The other hive is a little behind, partially filling 15 frames. I moved the dividing board over to give the bees two more frames, but if they fully fill 15 frames by the end of August, that will be a success. The lack of rain did not slow these bees down.
Not to count our chickens before they hatch, but we have been trying to estimate how much honey we will get so we can buy jars. We need to leave the bees about 90 pounds of honey for the winter, so that would be 9 to 10 frames, each frame weighing about 10 pounds. That translates to about 15 frames of honey we can remove, or roughly 150 pounds. That in turn equates to about 150 jars of honey. That seems like a lot of honey. I am not sure we will actually get that much, but we will see in a few weeks.
I scraped a little honey out of one of the hives for us to try. It is very light in color and has an herbal taste. Nothing like store-bought honey. Our biggest problem is that we are not sure how to get the honey out of the Layens hive frames. We have a honey extractor, but it is designed for Langstroth frames, which are smaller. We have 4 weeks to figure it out.
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