🐝💗Our Backyard Beekeeping Journey!💗🐝

fuzzi

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Everything went well. The girls were very calm in the first 3 hives. The swarm hive was a different story. They were a bit spicier and a few were buzzing my head. I'm so thankful for my veil, jacket, gloves & big boy pants (aka hubs jeans, they're thicker than mine).🤣

We worked as quickly as we could, put everything back together and put on the 2:1 syrup.

We will be extracting 14 frames of buckwheat honey and 14 frames of late summer honey. That will have to wait until we're back home next weekend.

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Very thankful to have the 3rd freezer. We were going to sell it, before we got our bees. So glad we didn't.
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Next year we might remove most of the supers in the middle of the buckwheat flow. Leave any frames that are mostly filled, so the girls can cap them. That will hopefully make it easier for them to fill up the deeps in prep for winter.

We should be able to keep feeding syrup until the end of October. We'll see what our temps do.
Why are they building comb on the tops/ends of the frames?
 

drstratton

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How much honey do you get from a frame?? I know it's not exact, just a round-about amount.
I had to go back and look. On our first harvest we averaged 3.25 lbs per frame. Our first 8 frames gave us 26 lbs. So far we've harvested about 15 gallons of honey.
 

drstratton

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Why are they building comb on the tops/ends of the frames?
That's called burr comb. They like to fill in all of the spaces they can, so they join the frames together. Sometimes the queen will lay drone eggs in it and sometimes the bees fill it with honey. That's why we limit the space between boxes and frames. They can make a real mess...lol
 

drstratton

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Back home and back to work! We'll be making syrup for the bees. I bought 125lbs of sugar from Costco on our way home. It's amazing how fast they go through it. We will wait to test for mites and extract the remaining honey frames until we get back from taking our DIL & grandbaby's to the airport in Seattle next week.

Got some pictures of our busy bees.

Rabbit Brush
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Their pollen pouches are loaded with dark orange pollen.
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Potentilla
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They're still loving the Dahlias .
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They are also on the Marigolds.
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We still have a lot of other flowers blooming that they are on. Not enough to fully support 4 hives. We have sweet clover, Mountain Bee Plant, Butterfly Weed and a few other plant seeds to get on/in the ground. Many of them need cold stratification to sprout. It will help the bees tremendously next fall.
 
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fuzzi

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Bees and blooms!
Portulaca
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Marigolds
This also shows a ladybug larvae.
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Not a bee...lol, but pretty!
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Have to enjoy these while they last. Winter is coming...🙁
Last one is a skipper butterfly, not sure of the variety.

ETA: it's probably a male Field skipper.
 
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