Honey Harvest and Splits!

Today we had some folks come over to help us harvest honey! We were only able to snag 11 full frames, but the yield was fantastic: 23 pounds of honey! I was expecting to get about 40 frames harvested, but with all of the recent activity we weren't able to take quite as much as expected. 

Here is the result - pretty dark since we mostly harvested honey that had been in the hive through winter, you can see that there is some spring honey towards the bottom of the jar (it's much lighter):

Here is happy helper, Cara, uncapping some fresh spring honey:

Thistle (purple hive) recently swarmed, so the honey supers were mostly emptied. We got about 4 good frames of honey harvested from Thistle.

Mint (green hive) didn't yield quite as much honey because there was a lot of brood mixed into they honey supers. I haven't been using queen excluders, and it hasn't really been a problem until now. I put a queen excluder on both Thistle and Mint. We got 6 good frames from Mint. Here is happy helper, Evan, taking a look at one of the frames we found in the supers in Mint (you can see that the center is filled with brood, the edges have beautiful capped honey from spring):

On the bright side of having a lot of brood in the supers: we got to see some baby bees hatching! This was definitely a highlight for folks (she is in the middle of the picture, just starting to chew through the wax capping of her cell):

Buttercup (yellow hive) didn't have an escape board on it (one of the boards that drains the bees from the honey supers and had similar issues with brood mixed in with the honey. I took 1 frame of honey from them but then left them the rest.

I figured that Buttercup had the highest likelihood of swarming at this point (having come from a swarm last year and coming out of the winter as one of the stronger, well-balanced hives). So I attempted to do a split. I took frames with eggs, pollen, nectar, honey, larvae, and capped brood and transferred them into a fourth hive (about 5 frames total). There were no queen cells, so I hope that the bees will be able to select an egg to raise into an emergency queen, we'll see in the next 16 days or so what happens (it takes a queen 16 days to hatch from the day it was laid). Here is happy helper, Wyatt, helping select frames to put into the new hive: