I opened up all 8 of my hives. They are doing great.<\/p>\n
The packages have all been installed about a month. They are packed with bees. In all cases they had 5 or more frames dense with bees and 7 or 8 full drawn frames. The nectar is flowing well here and none of the bees have been emptying the top feeders very fast, so I am satisfied that they are happy.<\/p>\n
I pulled a couple of center frames on the packages and I saw eggs and brood. I put a second deep on all the package hives, except one. I don’t have enough deep boxes so I am making a temporary one out of plywood. I was tired last night and measured something wrong, so the first try did not fit the frames. For some reason I have about 15 unused deep frames and 20 unused mediums. I also have a bunch of deep wood frames that the mice got into and I need to replace the foundation. I have a pile of disassembled frames and some foundation, but the foundation was exposed to the heat. I may order some plastic foundation for the frames that need it.<\/p>\n
I opened two hives that wintered and the split. I opened just the top and checked some frames. The top boxes each had 7 or 8 frames full of honey. I put a queen excluder on two of them and a medium super. I’ll have honey by Memorial day. The other hive had a medium super that I left on all winter. It was chock full of honey. I put another medium super on top of that.<\/p>\n
I will pull the honey supers off on Memorial Day and spin the Honey. That should be about 100 pounds if things go well. I will check the new packages then and see if they need supers. <\/p>\n
I will make the plywood deep this week and put it on the last hive. If it works I will make half a dozen medium honey supers. Plywood boxes with furring strip braces on the outside cost about $1.50 each as apposes to $20-$25 plus shipping for the nice boxes. I may buy a couple of deep boxes, but I can’t see buying medium supers. They aren’t going to be on over the winter and if they don’t hold much weight if I put them on top. If they only last a year or two they are well worth the effort to nail a few of them together – the bees don’t care.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I opened up all 8 of my hives. They are doing great. The packages have all been installed about a month. They are packed with bees. In all cases they had 5 or more frames dense with bees and 7 or 8 full drawn frames. The nectar is flowing well here and none of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.westnyackhoney.com\/bees\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/483"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.westnyackhoney.com\/bees\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.westnyackhoney.com\/bees\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.westnyackhoney.com\/bees\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.westnyackhoney.com\/bees\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=483"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.westnyackhoney.com\/bees\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/483\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.westnyackhoney.com\/bees\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=483"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.westnyackhoney.com\/bees\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=483"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.westnyackhoney.com\/bees\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=483"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}