After the state convention, I spent couple of days with my son’s family in Orlando, FL. We played golf until about 1:15 Monday afternoon. That’s when I started back home to Pensacola. I had already planned to pull honey on the way home.

I spent the night at a friend’s home in Chipley. Tuesday, I visited with the new president of the FL. State Beekeepers Association. We discussed the pros and cons of pulling honey and leaving it in my pickup bed overnight. If you pull honey, you need to get it inside away from the bees if you are not going to extract for a day or two. As it was going to be in the middle to high 30s that night, then it would be a while before the bees would fly on Wednesday and I would be okay.

I had one hive in Holly, and when I checked I found that 2 medium supers did not have any honey in them. The other super was a deep super that I wanted the bees to draw the comb out, but didn’t get back to it before they capped honey. Since I am leaving one super of honey on each hive, I decided to leave the deep on for this winter’s feed. I normally like to leave a medium super for this purpose. It was the first hive on the way home and the closet hive was about 20-25 miles down the road. I could not switch a smaller super with the deep one.

The next apiary had 4 colonies, but one had died. There was no extra honey. I need to go back at a later date and see what happened.

The next morning, I left town to go to a single hive in a garden owned by a little old lady. I collected one super there.

I left there and went about 45 miles to two apiaries in the north part of the county. There were 11 hives and between them I collected 9 supers of honey.

The final apiary of the day was just 10 miles farther north from where I was , and out of the 12 hives there, I had 5 living. I pulled 5 supers there. Now I had total of 15 medium supers of honey. The FFA had 3 supers of their own honey to extract. I only had 4 more hives to check which I was going to do the next day after extracting.

Now I have spent some time in telling this story to make a point. You really don’t know what kind of shape your colonies are in, or how much honey you have to pull if you don’t check your hives at least every 4 weeks. I have been indisposed for most of this year for one reason or another. I wasn’t able to get to my bees regularly. This is the only time this year that I have pulled honey. Normally, I would have pulled honey 3 times with a possible forth time. I had no idea of how much honey I would end up with or how many hives I would have left until I actually went and checked. Your bees will make you some money if you practice beekeeping as you should. I probably have lost over $1000 in honey and bees for lack of attention.

Back to the story. The next day, I carried the honey to a local high school in the north part of the county so the FFA - Ag classes could learn how to extract honey from the comb to get it ready to bottle. Last year, I had enough honey supers and they had several supers from the FFA - Ag group, that I had taken my 30 frame extractor out there to use. This year with so few supers, the Ag teacher and I decided to let the students use a two frame hand crank extractor to show them that it can be done. Not all new beekeepers can afford a motorized radial extractor nor is it advantageous to use one with just 2 or 3 colonies.

To be continued—-