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...