Sunday afternoon, I had my young beekeeper friends over to pull and extract my honey from the colonies in the back yard. We ended up with a shallow, a medium, and a deep. After extraction, there was about eight and a half gallons of honey ready to be strained and bottled.

Now you are wondering why did I have three different sizes of honey supers. Well—I’ll tell you. When I was in Arkansas April and May, a year ago, one of my beekeeper friends made a check of my hives and had to put some of his supers on.  He only uses shallows.  I got most of them back to him, but I missed some and this is one of them. I use Illinois or medium supers, but sometimes I will put a deep super (brood box) on for a honey super so the bees will draw comb so I can have an extra ten frames for when I might need them. You know, pulling frames of brood and the frame I am replacing with is old comb that needs to be melted down, or a frame is broken, or a frame with duragilt  with all the wax chewed off.

I don’t do many of the deeps as I cannot lift them without help. Sometimes I have to pull  frames of honey and brush the bees off and carry the frames to a nuc box just so I can transport to the pickup or honey house.

Anyway, back to my story. You remember that I had three hives in the back yard, well now I only have two. I found that the beetles and wax moths have moved in. Seems that the bees decided to vacate the premises for reasons unknown. I had opened the top of the hive and found webbing in the second super. I will have to clean all the boxes sometime this week and I will post what I have found. I do know that the Small Hive Beetle larvae are all over the top super and assume that is the case throughout the hive.

Are all you out there ready for the Dearth from now to Fall (which is the bee’s Winter)? I hope you left at least a medium or two shallows of honey for each of your hives. They really need honey as a food. Also as a side note, I have a friend in Argentina, Oscar Perone, who has an article that is interesting.It is in English so you can read and understand. Talks about the Nosema Ceranae parasite that is the real cause of CCD, with the help of beekeepers. Go figger. hehe Good reading anyway. Another article that you might want to read. This one talks about the reason you shouldn’t feed sugar to the bees. My thoughts for a little over two years, but I didn’t know how to put it in writing. One more link is from UK, Caroline van Issum has a blog that is informative.

Now to get back to reading some more bee books. Happy 4th of July!!