Cleaning Wax

Cleaning wax is not my favorite thing. I get a lot of wax through the honey harvesting process, not to mention knocking out any burr comb. Usually I leave it honey soaked until I am ready to melt it down. This time I tried washing my wax straight away. I filled up my uncapping tub with water and sloshed around the wax until it was clean.

I strained out the water using my coarse filter, it looks pretty nice:

This will be a lot easier to melt down and filter to make some nice candles later :)

The bees were VERY curious what I was up to while I was doing this. It was really hard to clean my honey soaked equipment out in the front yard like I usually do. Last year, I harvested honey around the same time and everything worked out fine. This year there must be a lot less in bloom because I got mobbed by bees as I was cleaning. Towards the end, I even had to put on my bee suit. The bees are typically very calm and I'm not as cautious while cleaning, but when there is very little nectar, the bees tend to get grouchy and protective. Better safe than stung.

Honey Harvest, Fall Cleanup, and Robbing

We had an excellent honey harvest over the weekend! We had some friends come down to help us out, the "purple" hive was getting quite tall. It's hard to even call it the purple hive anymore since I've had to scavenge boxes from the other hives just to keep up with their honey production!

Overall we harvested about 20 frames of honey, which turned out to be 44 pounds. I bottled 60 jars of honey (6oz each) leaving roughly 20 pounds to a friend of mine to brew mead (which has been turning out very well!).

I also took this opportunity to do a bit of fall cleanup. I have had quite a bit of crystallized honey hanging around in some of my frames since last season. The bees don't seem to have touched it over the summer, and I can't get it out of the comb to harvest it. So I knocked out several of the crystallized honey frames (below):

I also cleared out some of the "wild comb" from the new yellow hive. They've got a bunch of odd looking frames because I gathered the colony from a fence, cutting out pieces of comb and putting it into frames. The yellow hive seems to not have enough nectar coming in, because they cleaned out those combs and have left them empty. I'm taking the opportunity to knock out their strange pattern, I'll melt down the wax to use it later:

Since the yellow hive seems to be eating up all of their honey stores already, I put a full medium super of honey on their hive. Unfortunately I didn't seal up the top of the hive properly... So the stronger green and purple hives immediately went into attack mode and started robbing the honey from them. Luckily I my mistake within an hour and was able to close the hive and put an entrance reducer on (so that the yellow hive could defend their home a little better). Hopefully I caught this robbing soon enough, but there were definitely dead bees all around the hive. I hope I didn't kill my already struggling hive...

Harvest Preparation

After my poor experience using "Honey Bandit" during the last honey harvest, I decided to prepare for my next honey harvest using the bee escapes. The downside of using the bee escapes is that you have to put them on the hive a few days before harvesting. Luckily my little brother was in town to help me out:

I also wanted to check in on the yellow hive to see that they were getting settled in. I wasn't sure that the queen actually survived the move from the fence into the hive. Since the hive is so small, we actually found her on a frame! Isn't she pretty:

The queen made it, but the yellow hive is desperately low on honey and nectar. Since I caught them late in the season when less is blooming, they've had less of a chance to gather food. They probably need most of the worker bees to keep the brood warm and tend to the queen, leaving few bees to forage... I'll have to give them some honey from one of the other hives to try to boost their strength before winter.