I was on vacation for two weeks with my wife and siblings. When there was a lull in the festivities, I had plenty of time to think about my bees. I had decided to move bees when I got back. I wanted to move 6 hives to a Palmetto location where I have an apiary with one hive that had died due to not having a queen.

As we were coming home from Texas, I called one of my new beekeepers to help me on Monday. We made plans to begin about 7:00 AM. Remember, I had not seen my bees for about 3 weeks at this time. We went to the apiary to pick up the hives and found that they had completely plugged out the supers with honey. We then went to another apiary and found that the bees had plugged out all their supers also. Since I did not think to take any empty supers with us. That day was shot.

The next day, today, I went by myself to pull honey. I only took one super as that was all I had ready to go. I started by pulling the top super and checking the second for brood. I moved all the capped honey to the super to be put on the truck and placed all the uncapped honey in the super with the brood. Capped honey is ready to extract and the uncapped honey was still being processed by the bees meaning that there was still water in the uncapped cells of nectar/honey. When the honey has been sufficiently heated and fanned by the bees to evaporate the water, they will cap the cells. Sort of like making gravy. Add heat and stir until the gravy is thick.

Being by myself with the temperature in the high 90′s, it took me about 5 hours to collect 8 supers of honey. I had intended to extract tonight, but I was tired and decided to get some sleep and move bees in the morning and extract the honey tomorrow evening when the temperature goes down to the low 90′s.

By not planning and having some supers ready to replace the honey supers, I wasted all of one day and I could have used the help of the young beekeeper and got all that work done in half a day and possibly have extracted Monday leaving today to move bees.

Planning ahead and keeping the supers and boxes clean with good comb or foundation is just plain good sense. Try to keep on top of you homework and the bee work will be fun again.